Content to die for | Sophisticated copywriting & LinkedIn growth services for Founders & Entrepreneurs | LinkedIn Strategy for personal & business brands | Not a pain in the neck | Founder @ Vampire Digital

For thinkers, for seekers, for anyone feeling the tension of being human in an over-automated world. 

For those who are tired of noise, shortcuts, and of being spoon-fed content that demands nothing of them…If you are tired of all the clickbait… I offer you Thinkbait.

Beyond better content, Thinkbait is a rebellion, a call to think deeper, write truer, and create with intention at a time when speed is worshipped above substance. 

It’s my answer to a cultural moment that prizes automation over imagination, and optimisation over originality.

Creating the Thinkbait way means choosing depth over dopamine. 

It means writing that stays with your reader long after they scroll further, and language that refuses to flatten itself for the algorithm.

My work explores what it means to stay human in a system increasingly built to replace human nuance. 

I write about the philosophical implications of AI, the erosion of creative integrity, and the slow extinction of thought in an age obsessed with efficiency.

I am a Human Intelligence Defender and AI Commentator, speaking on the future of creativity, the ethics of automation, and the irreplaceable intelligence of the human mind.

With over seven years of experience working with global SaaS, B2B, and tech founders, from Harvard and MIT researchers to reality TV personalities, I’ve helped leaders build audiences that think, feel, and follow. 

My agency, Vampire Digital, is positioned as a deliberate resistance to the AI-content flood: a home for human writing that converts through connection.

Before founding Vampire Digital, I spent twelve years in corporate communications and began my career as a journalist, writing investigative pieces and cultural commentary that demanded rigour, and truth-telling — qualities that now underpin every story my team and I craft for clients.

If you’re seeking a keynote speaker, AI ethics panellist, or media voice who can translate the human condition into intelligent conversation, I’d love to collaborate. 

As a champion of human thought and creativity, I’m not afraid of voicing my stance, even if that means going against the grain.

And if you’re a founder, investor, or thought leader ready to break out of the content hamster wheel and create something extraordinary, my team and I can help you:

❗️ Command attention in your industry ❗️ Attract high-value clients while you focus on your business ❗️ Position yourself as the undisputed authority in your field

Let’s build something that outlives the algorithm. 👉🏼 https://calendly.com/vampiredigital/intro-with-zsike

A civil engineer builds a bridge.
A prompt engineer builds a sentence.
Only one of those collapses when you sneeze.

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thesparedeskapp

vampire-digital

Inbound opportunities for £1M+ B2B companies | Strategic positioning & premium content | Founder of Vampire Digital & Thinkbait™ | Ex-journalist | Speaker | Author

Let’s not mistake aesthetic minimalism for intellectual effort.

Do you have skin in the game?

A prospect who’s found me through LinkedIn asked me this on an intro call last week.

I didn't answer the way I wanted to because, thinking on the spot, I felt I had to give him the professional version.

I’ve been pondering about how I’d answer this if a friend asked me… So here's the full answer with more context:

I am a single mother of two young children who need stability, security, and a mother who is present and not unravelling mentally or emotionally. 

Three of my nine team members’ sole income comes from Vampire Digital. 
If our work slips, if clients leave, if the reputation cracks, three families feel it. 

I chase late payments from clients with their own cash flow crises, because that's the unglamorous reality of running an agency where you actually care whether it works.

My mother died in October. I spent the months before that flying between the UK and Hungary, sitting with her through palliative care alongside my sisters, then flying back to be with my children, then back again. 

Grief doesn't have a schedule and mine is still sitting heavily, largely unprocessed, somewhere I haven't yet had the space or stillness to really think about what has happened.

Nobody on a discovery call sees any of this.

I am also building CoMamma, an algorithm-based (non-romantinc) matchmaking app for single and solo-by-choice mothers to rebuild the village digitally — the village that modern life dismantled, the village I could do with right now. I believe in it and I am building it anyway, alongside everything else.

I could get a job. The thought crosses my mind more than I'd like to admit.
And still, I want to write, I want to help clients with their marketing positioning, I want to speak on stages to promote my mission with Thinkbait…

I want to do this work well. I feel the pull of it even now, even through AI disruption and hustle culture and the charlatans making it harder for everyone doing it with integrity.

Skin in the game.
I'm not sure what more there is to lose.

You look like someone who might want this goat.

Humans have been interrupting each other with commercial intent since the first trader tapped a stranger on the shoulder and said… 

"You look like someone who might want this goat."

That stranger did not want the goat.
He had a goat. He had several goats! 

He was, by all accounts, drowning in goats and actively looking for a way out of the goat situation. But somewhere between the shoulder tap and the pitch, he gave in and the goat found a home.

This is the oldest sales story in human history, and also, somehow, the plot of most LinkedIn DMs.

Cold outreach has its place but the problem with employing it alone is that it casts you permanently as the goat salesman.

You arrive uninvited and explain who you are. 
You justify why this particular goat is different from all the other goats you already have. Maybe his goatee is more attractive than your other goats’. 

You attempt to convert mild confusion into interest, vague interest into a call, and a call into a contract… while the other person wonders how long they have to stay on this call before they can go back to their actual life.

Sometimes the goat finds a home, but statistically, not often enough to make it a relaxing career choice.

Inbound, on the other hand, is a fundamentally different experience.

Nobody messages you to say, "I have been silently consuming your content for eleven months, never liked a single post, stalking your profile like a lurker, and now my Q3 budget looks fine and I feel ready to buy your goat.” 

They don't say that. But that is, more or less, word for word, what has happened.

They already know who you are, and already respect what you do. They came to you. 

The goat didn't need a pitch because the goat had already been living rent-free in their head for the better part of a year, and by the time they messaged you, they'd already named it Garry.

Cold outreach asks for attention.

But inbound is what happens when you've already earned it, day by day, post by post, from people who didn't know they were warming up until suddenly they were ready to buy and your name was the first one that came to mind. 

Along with, inexplicably, the goat.

When your visibility consistently reaches people with budget, authority, and a burning problem that is actively ruining their Sundays, the sales conversation stops feeling like a negotiation. 

Nobody is defending themselves against the goat. 
Everyone already likes the goat.

Authority compounds, and I will keep saying this like a deranged parrot, because facts are facts. 

Outbound finds people, but a pre-built authority engine makes the RIGHT people find you.
And when both are working, something rather pleasant happens to your pipeline… 

The goat, at this point, is practically selling itself.

We're opening one new client spot.
And you don't even have to buy a goat from us.

No one cares until you make them care.
No one cares about your perfect LinkedIn posts.

Which sounds cruel, but in fact, it’s actually liberating because it means you can stop performing for imaginary judges and start doing the only thing that works on the internet…

Repeated exposure to a distinctive signal.

Let me give you the tough love you need, ok?

People don’t accidentally discover you because of a single perfectly polished post and then lovingly remember you forever like a cute little rescued puppy. 

The reality of LinkedIn and generally the online ecosystem is more like: they bump into you, briefly register you, get distracted by something shiny, and then forget you existed.

They are not being malicious, just succumbing to their human nature.

We are consuming constant content with medieval brains and these brains are not built for recall.  
We respond to novelty.

Which is why you can write something genuinely epic, get a the occasional rush of thoughtful comments, feel mildly seen for ten minutes… and then watch everyone move on as if they’ve never read it.

I’ve done it to other people, and they’ve done it to me. If I disappeared from LinkedIn for a couple of weeks, a few kind people might message, or a couple of lurkers would lose their favourite spectator sport. The rest of the internet would carry on breathing as if I never existed in the first place.

Because THEY. DON’T. CARE.

So when a client tells me, they’re waiting until they have something really important to say, or they have to keep rewriting their posts until they feel it’s all perfect, or they have to keep proving how brilliant they are by making all the posts about themselves… what I hear is, they’re trying to win a game they refuse to play.

If your angle is to come across as being important you are already on the wrong track, because the name of game is FAMILIARITY. It’s why people buy into you.

You don’t need to be outrageous or manufacture controversy for the sake of it. You don’t even need to start fights with strangers as your new favourite sport. 

But you DO need to be present often enough, and clear enough, that your audience develops a simple mental shortcut: 

Oh, it’s her again… this will probably be worth reading!

That’s how trust actually forms; through the slow, consistent accumulation of small recognitions.

And yes, it’s mildly ego-bruising to accept this, especially if you’re competent and you’ve spent years being rewarded for competence. 

Online, competence is table stakes. The advantage goes to the person who can make their competence feel familiar, legible, better than the competitors and therefore, slightly inevitable.

If you are building a presence that’s meant to turn into revenue, reputation, speaking invitations, book sales, or clients, consistency is the cost of admission.

Nobody cares until you make them care.

And then you have to keep making them care, because the feed and your audience has the memory of a goldfish.

Let's talk.

“Most people” is not a peer-reviewed study. 💁🏻‍♀️

I need to tell you something.


I have close to 32,500 followers on LinkedIn. 
People who engage with my posts, people who have used the word "insightful" in my comments. 
On multiple documented occasions!

I announced a live Thinkbait session over the last few weeks, multiple times...
And four people registered.
FOUR.

I'm fine. I have crunchy peanut butter and the last remaining shreds of my professional self-concept.

Now. In the spirit of the session itself (which is literally about reaching the right people, not just any people) I'm choosing to see this as a highly targeted result. 

I have identified four genuinely excellent humans out of 32,500. 
That's precision targeting. 
That's vampiric strategy. 
That's absolutely what I meant to do.

Tomorrow, Thursday 12th March at 2:30pm GMT, I'm running a Thinkbait Session on Sales Navigator and LinkedIn audience targeting. 

It was planned as an hour but I decided to extend it to 90 minutes because I looked at the agenda and felt the familiar creeping sensation of having too much to say. 

You're welcome, or I'm sorry, depending on your schedule.

We're covering: 

🤌🏼 How to use Sales Navigator like a strategist, not a door-to-door salesman with a quota and no shame. 

🤌🏼 How to warm up leads without the ambush pitch that makes everyone feel instantly assaulted. 

🤌🏼 How to find buyers who are actually alive and in-market, rather than enthusiastically selling to the digitally comatose. 

🤌🏼 And how to build a network you'd genuinely want to be in.


£50. 
Ninety minutes. 
Proper Q&A. 
No dude-bro templates.

Register: https://lu.ma/myk0kv2u

Come and save me from my own metrics. Please…

And if you've been silently lurking around my content for fourteen months, never liked a single post, but thought “She’s alright, that one.” ... now would be an extraordinary time to emerge.

My 15 core believes that no one can ever change my mind on:

1. Crunchy peanut butter is far superior to smooth peanut butter. 

2. Talking of any kind of spreads: they have to go all the way to the edge of the toast, but NOT down the side of the crust so you end up with sticky fingers. If I want jam on toast, I want jam on toast - and not surprise dry bits!

3. Morning-person people are annoying. Talk to me after lunch, ok? I’m also impartial to midnight meetings.

4. Tea has to be brewed for 3-4 minutes first, teabag comes out, and only then you add the milk. 

5. If I weigh less than the average 14-year-old, I should have extra luggage allowance on planes.

6. Getting ChatGPT to write your marketing materials, business proposals, slide decks, etc… doesn’t suddenly make you an expert at anything. And no, this is not about gatekeeping or democratising knowledge - you haven’t earned the expertise you’re now attempting to fake. Stop this charlatan nonsense.

7. Your brain is a perishable organ. Prompt accordingly. Writing or prompting - which one is more likely to cause mental malnourishment?

8. One can never have too many books. Even if they’re unread.

9. If you say you don’t have time to read but spend over 2 hours every day scrolling strangers arguing in comment sections, I reserve the right to immediately confiscate your phone.

10. Children should be allowed to be bored. That’s where imagination grows.

11. If you send a “quick call?” message with zero context, I will assume it is neither quick nor necessary.

12. A personally-written, non-templated note still beats a 14-step automated funnel. Always.

13. Just because something scales doesn’t mean it should. Fast food scales. So does mediocrity.

14. If you can’t explain your business without buzzwords, you probably don’t have a business.

15. When a recipe calls for a clove of garlic, just presume it's a typo and you use the whole bulb. 


And I stand by every single one of these with the confidence of someone whose birth year doesn’t start with 2 while giving out life advice.

Your turn. What’s a belief you refuse to surrender?

We are producing more content than at any point in recorded history.

More posts. 
More carousels. 
More "frameworks" written by people who discovered the concept approximately forty minutes before publishing it. 

More AI-assisted slop that is technically coherent and somehow says absolutely nothing.

And yet a significant number of founders will admit that none of it is working.
I have been speaking with many of them over the last few weeks, and I have to say, I am not surprised.

Volume seems like momentum because it has the same physiological signature. 
You're busy…. Things are happening… The algorithm may or may not nod approvingly. 

But your pipeline is still dry and you have no potential clients banging on your door.

If you are publishing daily but that is all there is to it… you can’t call it a strategy. 

It is, at best, a habit. At worst, it is shouting in a crowded room and being mildly surprised that no one specific heard you.

What produces qualified conversations (you know.. the ones involving people with budgets, and authority) is positioning. 

Proximity to the right people. 
Audience architecture.

AI has made content easier to produce, but it has done nothing for trust. 

Trust still requires clarity of thought, consistency of signal, and an identifiable human perspective worth paying attention to.

If your content is generating vanity metrics but your DMs are full of tumbleweeds and not much else… drop me a message. This is exactly the sort of problem we help founders with.

Or book yourself in via my Calendly: https://lnkd.in/eAqeP2-G

A therapy session for LinkedIn users.

“Nobody wants to buy my goat.”

Me: 
Take a seat. Tell me when this started.

“I connected with 847 people last quarter. Sent them all the same message. Something about synergies.”

Me:
I see. And the goat… how long have you been trying to sell it?

“Since I read that cold outreach was dead and pivoted to warm outreach, which is the same thing but I say their name first.”

[Eye-rolling myself into another universe at this point] 

“I also added a voice note. I recorded it seventeen times.”

[I bet the final version still sounds like he is reading from a card.]

Me:
What does the card say?

“‘Hi [FIRST NAME], I came across your profile and I have to say, I was really impressed.’”

Me:
You left the bracket in, didn’t you.

“Only twice.”

Me:
And the goat? Tell me about the goat.

“It’s a good goat. Strong value proposition….Solves a real problem. I just can’t seem to get traction.”

Me:
Have you considered that the problem isn’t the goat?

“My coach said I need a stronger hook, so now I open with a controversial opinion.”

Me:
What’s the controversial opinion?

“That goats are underrated.”

Me:
That’s hardly controversial. That’s a fact universally acknowledged by everyone who has ever met a goat.

“I also do a carousel now, 10 slides. Slide one says ‘Everything you know about goats is wrong.’ Slide ten says to follow me for more goat content.”

Me:
What’s on slides two through nine?
“…the goat.”

[long pause]

Me:
We’re going to need more sessions.
🤦🏻‍♀️


---
Want funny goats, I mean posts like these for your own LinkedIn?
We are not goat salesmen, but we can certainly write way better than AI.

Book yourself in for a quick chat with me, to see if we're a good fit: https://lnkd.in/efXbAXGh

Most LinkedIn advice is the equivalent of being told to JUST BE YOURSELF before a job interview.

Technically true... Completely useless.

I wrote a 90-day blueprint for founders, consultants and SDRs who want actual clients from LinkedIn, not engagement from people who will never buy anything.

It's free, practical, and it will not insult your intelligence.

Grab it here if you'd like it, and I promise to never just spam your inbox in return.

https://lnkd.in/djxRhFPv


--
My rock-climbing pic for the algorithm. 
Made you stop scrolling, didn't it?

Just do it.

Disclaimer: this post is not sponsored by Nike.

Want your business to appear in AI-powered search results?
Then this is worth reading... 👇🏼

And if you want to learn all about finding your ideal clients using Sales Navigator, I have something for you: https://lnkd.in/e7pEtRTp

A Vampire Digital Case Study

If I were running a £3M ARR B2B company right now, I would be obsessing over one thing:

Does my visibility match my revenue?

Somewhere between £1M and £5M:

Referrals slow down.
The network gets saturated.
You’re still excellent but increasingly invisible outside your immediate circle.

And posting occasionally “to stay active” acts as maintenance but you certainly can’t call it a strategy.

At that stage, I would leave the engagement chasing to the young ones at the playground, and architect solid positioning instead.

That looks like 
– Sharper narrative
– Deliberate audience growth
– Content built for commercial leverage
– Inbound conversations that feel pre-sold

Also, and this may be unpopular, I wouldn’t outsource my thinking to AI prompts and volume hacks. 

When you’re operating at that level, your mind is the asset. Dilute that and you dilute your reputation.

We’re working with a handful of founder-led B2B companies who are ready to treat authority like infrastructure rather than an afterthought.

If your business has outgrown your presence, let’s talk.

Stopping marketing during a recession is a great way to make money...


for your competitors! 

Businesses that stop marketing will simply leave a gap for their competitors to expand into, and will, on average, take 3 years to catch back up. 

It's a complete myth that cutting the marketing budget will help weather a recession better, but like many harmful myths it refuses to die.

So, what's it gonna be, buttercup? Save money now to lose money later, or spend money now to make more money later?

(And no, you can't AI your way out of this one with ChatGPT-concocted content)

I've capped the next live Thinkbait Session at 30 people.

This is either a bold strategic decision to ensure intimate, high-value discussion … or a deeply optimistic assumption about my own popularity.

Possibly both.

Either way, I've also decided to extend it to 90 minutes, while the price remains the same.

If 30 people are going to show up and watch me explain how to find your ideal clients without stalking them or cold-calling strangers who were just trying to have a normal Monday… they deserve the full version.

This is what you're getting on 12th March:

90 minutes… 
Step by step…

How to identify, build and target lists of exactly the right people on LinkedIn, with enough context and relevance that your message doesn't feel like an unwanted flyer tucked under a windscreen wiper (and thrown straight into the nearest bin).

I don’t do templates or spray-and-pray. 
I will not be teaching you any pretending of “I just came across your profile" when you very clearly did not.

Instead, you’ll get the actual process we use at Vampire Digital, all explained clearly and laid out properly.

£50, live on Zoom with a long Q&A included.

30 spots — some of which are already gone, and by that I mean two, which is doing wonders for my confidence.

Register here: https://luma.com/myk0kv2u

Don't make me present to an empty room. 
I've done it once and we don't talk about it.

I just hope my voice will be back by then because this latest cold virus I caught is not helping my husky dulcet vocals.

The possibilities and pitfalls of technological and scientific advancement have been the stuff of centuries worth of dreaming about human progress, yet here too we find ourselves treading a viciously circular path. 

Free development, experimentation and research leads to Artificial Intelligence, which not only threatens to supplant the human mind but is intended specifically to overcome its limitations, to replicate humanity without its frailties. 

Leaving aside more abstract questions about what this would look like and mean should it be achieved, one does not have to look very far for the dead birds littering the path to 'progress' like autumn leaves, from the astronomical energy costs burdening a burning planet to the people whose jobs will increasingly be done by AI. 

This is what blind commitment to an uncritically adopted idea of 'progress' looks like; proponents of Al talk about the freedom it brings, but are vague on freedom from what, for who and what for. 

Freedom for humanity to dedicate itself to leisure, art or meditation? Or freedom for an oligarchy of technocrats from the slightest tethering to the social contract, in exchange for reducing humanity to a cog in the endless self-reproduction of Al?

From the brilliant mind of Slavoj Žižek, taken from his book ‘Against progress’ — an intellectual meditation on progress. Dissecting the opponents of the future (like Trumpian populists, or toxic accelerationists) one sharply written essay at a time.

Absolutely mind blowing.  And I’m having to wrestle with my own brain to make it understand; a fun and frustrating exercise forcing myself to re-read some sentences multiple times. 

Read it and let’s talk about it…

Professor Of Philosophy at Cambridge College

The manosphere and the marketing dude bro industry have the same business model.

Discuss… 👇🏽

taplio

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