Over $3.5M Generated | Copywriter & Marketing Strategist | Helping Creators & Coaches Transform Likes into Lifetime Customers

In 2019, I decided to dive into the world of direct response copywriting. 

Then my life took a turn of events. 

I started an agency with my mentor and was exposed to various niches in the marketing world. After years of agency experience and being exposed to high-level marketing strategies, the next path was clear. 

This is what led me to founding Ascend Social. 

The agency is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and creators scale their personal brand through ghostwriting and email marketing. 

My #1 goal is to share my journey and insights to empower all writers and creators. 

Whether it’s entrepreneurship, personal development or marketing… 

I hope you can take away something from each post. 

See you in the feed,  

- Jasmine

Jasmine Pierce

I help you craft your social media strategies | Social Media Strategist & Consultant

I help you:

1. Get attention from your ideal clients
2. Clarity and direction - Have a clear plan to follow rather than feeling uncertain or overwhelmed
3. Consistency - Easy-to-follow plan that helps you without the struggle
4. Go after the quick wins

If this sounds good to you, send me a DM

Frank Velasquez

The ghostwriting agencies I've watched fail all had one thing in common. Their content was actually performing.

Their clients still left. Usually around month three or four.

Every workflow these agencies built was optimized for internal efficiency, not for making the client feel heard. It was all about getting new clients and plugging them into the system. And clients don't usually say that out loud when they decide to leave. They just don't renew.

Most of them blamed the writing anyway. Better hooks, more templates, more syncs, more efficiency. They were spending 90% of their energy acquiring new clients and 10% on the ones they already had.

No wonder they kept leaving.

3 places where I see this break down:

1. Onboarding that collects information but never asks what the client wants to be known for, for example.

2. Content calls that feel like data collection instead of actual conversations that might spark good, insightful ideas.

3. Reporting that tracks metrics but never checks for recognition, whether the relationship is healthy, or whether the content actually sounds like them.

The agencies keeping clients long-term are not just focused on adding efficiency. They're focused on retention too.

Consultant and Ghostwriter | Scale LinkedIn presence with strategy & systems. Helping other ghostwriters do the same.

Is a post less valuable if it was written by AI?

I've been watching 2 camps on LinkedIn: 

The first is AI-generated content. LinkedIn broetry style, 5th-grade level, hitting hundreds of likes, teaching something useful. 

The second is the warriors. People calling it out, listing all the AI-isms, counting the em dashes, the "it's not X, it's Y". That content is also getting numbers.

Here's the part that gets me. Most of the people sharing the warrior posts are probably liking AI posts without realizing it. The content probably helped them. They may have saved it, or even shared it. Then two posts later, they're nodding along to someone explaining how to spot the soulless AI content destroying LinkedIn.

So I genuinely want to know: If the content teaches you something real, does it matter how it got made?

Curious where people actually stand on this one.

In the last 12 months, our clients crossed 5M+ organic impressions on LinkedIn. Now we are giving you an insight into how we are doing it 👇

At the start of 2025, Hivemind Marketing had 2 clients and a few consulting gigs. At the same time this year, we are at 8 clients with expanded SOW, 2 new incoming, and several consulting partners.

Our clients are:

1. Walking into events and getting recognized for their content. 

2. They're having their own posts referred back to them mid-conversation. 

3. They're closing clients who came in already convinced.

For 3 days, Harry Phokou will be giving you an insight into how we've managed it all. Especially the content part, we believe there is a big gap to fill when it comes to sharing more stories, more wins, more insights on this platform.

If you or someone on your team wants to learn how we are helping our clients make the most of LinkedIn, join his free live event.

📅 March 6th, 7th & 8th
⏰ 5 PM CET
📍 Live on Zoom
🧑‍🎨 6 guest speakers
🔗 https://lnkd.in/evpgeQX5

Repost and help spread the word 🙏

Three months into ghostwriting, I stopped building content plans around client personas and problem-solving topics. 

The logic made sense at the time. Upload the client's profile, find the problems their audience has, write posts about how to solve them. 

That's what you learn. Lead with the pain, deliver the solution. 

The issue is that most of our clients aren't in the business of teaching people how to do what they do. They're in the business of getting hired to do it themselves. Their audience isn't looking to execute, they're looking for someone they trust enough to hand it to.

The content that actually gets clients hired doesn't explain how to solve a problem. It says something their audience has felt but never put into words. An insight that makes someone stop and think "I've never heard it framed that way." 

That's what prompts a DM. Not a tutorial.

Once we understood that, the whole content process changed. We stopped looking for topics and started looking for the way our clients think.

We've written this hook for five different clients in five different industries. It works every time. The formula: 

Past struggle + present contrast. 

Take a founder's real low point. Put it next to where they are now. Two sentences. The reader fills in the entire journey between them.

My first job was cleaning locker rooms with a finance degree. Now I run content operations for a ghostwriting agency across three time zones. That took one sentence to set up. And maaaybe you want to know what happened in between.

Nothing about this is manipulative. The failure is real. The recovery is real. We just put them in the right order.

However, there are instances where these were performed, but we felt they could have done better. The issue was giving too much away in the hook. So the reader is left like, "Well, why do I have to click 'see more '?" 

Hard for me to say when I'm doing it, it's usually something I see after the post has gone live.

Big impressions are easy to get excited about. 

They're also easy to hide behind. 

A post that gets 50,000 views and zero DMs is not a good post for a service seller. It's just a popular one. Top-of-funnel content attracts top-of-funnel audiences, people who found the post interesting but have no reason to reach out. 

What we track when we get a viral post are things that could lead to results. Resume submission, meeting requests, DMs, conversations, etc.

The agencies I've seen struggle with this aren't producing bad content. They're optimizing for the wrong metric and calling it growth.

Someone builds a following on LinkedIn → People start asking for help. → They think, "Let me do this for clients." → They start ghostwriting. 

If this is you, here are 4 things worth knowing before you take on your first client:

1. Your voice is a liability here. Everything that made your content work was built around how you think and speak. The instinct to write that way doesn't disappear when you're writing for someone else. You have to actively fight it.

2. Your templates won't transfer. What worked on your account was built for your audience, your service, and your positioning. A different client means a different buyer with different reasons to reach out. The format might look the same. The results won't.

3. Scaling before you have a repeatable process just means making the same mistakes faster. Most people hire a writer before they've documented what good actually looks like for each client.

4. Viral posts and conversion posts are not the same thing. Your audience grew because of one. Your clients need the other.

I've worked through most of these in consulting calls, these are always easier to sort out and learn before you make mistakes and damage your reputation. 

My advice: get in touch with people already killing it on different aspects of your service. Content, outbound, DMs, AI, etc. Then offer it to others for an entry price before scaling. I don't believe you should do it for free, but also not at full price before you know you can do this.

The first few months I was ghostwriting, I was basically writing as myself with different topics.

I didn't notice it for a while. The posts were performing fine. Clients weren't complaining. But looking back at the drafts, everything had the same rhythm, the same sentence length, the same way of ending a thought. 

That was me, not them. 

I'd taken what they gave me and run it through my own filter so many times that nothing original was left.

The fix was just learning to be uncomfortable leaving sentences that felt slightly off to me but were exactly how the client spoke.

Every week, I take one call transcript and run it through one prompt. I get 5-8 post ideas I didn't have to think of. Here's what I look for.

I've shared before that we shifted from giving value and teaching people how to do something to sharing insights, cause that shows more about how they think about problems in their industry.

So the prompt isn't looking for everything. 

It's specifically looking for process insights, philosophy moments, counterintuitive decisions, and moments where I was explaining a framework without realizing it. And what it ignores is just as important. Small talk. Individual tactical feedback. Anything that doesn't have a broader principle behind it. 

After extraction, I get a clean list. Each insight has a title, the core idea in one sentence, the context from the conversation, and a content angle. Sometimes, a direct quote I said that I can use as a hook.

Then I pick which ones I want to develop into posts.

That's it. The hard part of content creation is having something worth saying. This solves that by surfacing what I already said, in calls that were already on my calendar.

This is the same process I use to extract insight from our clients from every call. The structure maps to any ghostwriter or agency operator who's on calls regularly.

Do you want the prompt? Send me a DM.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴: Content. Specifically, a steady stream of LinkedIn posts they don't have to think about it. They want the output problem solved. They're hiring a ghostwriter the same way they'd hire someone to handle their calendar, take the task off my plate, produce the thing, done.

Many of them also think they're buying reach. More followers, more impressions, more comments. They've seen someone else blow up on LinkedIn, and they want that.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱: A thinking partner who makes them legible to the right people, not more people.

The real product isn't posts. 

It's clarity about what they actually believe. Extracted, organized, and distributed in a way that attracts the 50 decision-makers who matter, not 50,000 strangers who don't. 

The interview process isn't a nice-to-have. It is the product. Most clients have never been asked the right questions about what they think. Our 60-minute session is usually the first time many of them have articulated their operating philosophy out loud.

They also need protection they don't know they need. 

Protection from sounding like every other executive on the platform. Protection from tactics that work for creators but damage credibility for leaders. Protection from their own instinct to follow what looks like it's working for someone else.

If you've ever wondered why your content performs but nothing converts, this is usually why.

At Lumiman, a smart home brand I worked with in China, we had a pile of inventory being pulled off Amazon. My job was to get rid of it. I had no idea what to do. We were paying a fee every day we had those bulbs in storage.

Then I remembered I'd been following Neville Medhora, and he'd told a story about running a store called House of Rave. He'd sent his list an email explaining he'd accidentally bought too much stock and needed it gone. It was one of his first times applying copywriting to his emails, and basically sold everything out. 

So I copied it. 

Almost word for word. 

Swapped the product details, kept the tone. Sent it.

A few people replied, asking if it was real. We said yes. Then some of them started buying ten bulbs at a time because the price undercut Amazon by a lot. We sold everything out slowly.

These days, we're used to beautiful emails, psychological triggers, countdown timers, and buttons everywhere. Looking back at that email, it was just text. The copy didn't try to be clever. It narrated a situation and made you feel like you were getting a deal meant for insiders.

Most people write emails trying to sound like a brand. That one sounded like a person who needed help moving boxes out of his garage. That was the difference.

I've seen a lot of these systems going around. I still have not seen one that fully works without putting generic stuff out. 

There's always this thing of lack of taste that AI has to filter what's good, what's going to resonate, what's worth sharing, etc. Not to mention how bad the output becomes if it one-shots everything.

AI for Marketing Operations | CEO at Surface Labs

we paid an AI content agency $6,000 to build a fully automated LinkedIn content system.

it was a complete waste of money 👇

they pitched us on a "full AI content engine" that would post on LinkedIn for us every day and grow our personal brand on autopilot. here's what they actually set up.

1/ a "trend research agent" that was supposed to find trending topics to post about. in reality it pulled the same generic topics every LinkedIn influencer is already posting about. nothing our audience would stop scrolling for.

2/ a "content ideation agent" that was supposed to turn topics into unique post angles. it gave us the same recycled frameworks. "I did X and here's what I learned." "most people think Y but actually Z." zero originality, zero point of view that sounded like me.

3/ a "ghostwriting agent" that was supposed to write publish-ready LinkedIn posts in my voice. every post sounded like ChatGPT pretending to be a thought leader. no real stories, no customer examples, no opinions worth reading.

4/ a "scheduling agent" that auto-posted every day. this one worked but everything it posted got zero engagement because it was content nobody cared about.

$6,000 for LinkedIn posts that got fewer likes than my actual posts written in 5 minutes.

so I scrapped the whole thing and just started writing the posts myself. I'd write a rough draft with my actual thoughts and real stories from customer calls, then run it through Claude to tighten the structure and clean it up. those posts outperformed everything the agency produced in 3 months combined.

the best content will always start with a human who has something worth saying and use AI to scale it, not the other way around.

use AI as your editor not your creator 🎯

We had this whole thing set up. Send the client a list of questions; they record voice notes on their own time, we get the material, and we write. It felt efficient and considerate of their schedule.

What we kept getting back was that because we were structuring the questions around specific posts we wanted to write, we were basically scripting their answers before they gave them. 

The content was basically written before they even answered.

We scrapped async entirely and moved to live interviews. No questions sent in advance. Just a call, us asking things we were genuinely curious about, and them just talking.

The difference was that in a real conversation, people stop performing. They stop trying to give the right answer and start just explaining what they think. They use their actual vocabulary. They go on tangents that end up being the best material. You can't manufacture that with a voice note prompt.

What we pull from those transcripts sounds like someone who just happened to sit down and write what they were thinking.

Now, by the time we open Notion, the hard part is already done.

taplio

The Battle

Jasmine Pierce

Frank Velasquez

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreFrank Velasquez's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Jasmine Pierce

Frank Velasquez

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

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);}Frank Velasquez's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreFrank Velasquez's LinkedIn Performance