Be Yourself Online, But Better

Not long after going freelance, I got a little bit sad and spiral-y about AI.

I was suddenly solo, relying entirely on my own ability to convince people to pay me for what they thought ChatGPT could do for free, and without the comfort of a salary either way. So I spiralled, and did what any self respecting writer would do, and took it to Substack.

I wrote the most sickeningly heartfelt piece. It was about AI, and it was a big, fat, love letter to human writers. It had very little to do with my actual work, really. I posted it without a CTA, without a sales agenda, and without really thinking anything else of it. I just wanted to say my piece.

That piece got 65k views, 700 new subscribers, and three enquiries for tone of voice work. In a month, it directly generated more revenue than I’d made from my freelancing so far.

And it did all that, largely, because it was just me, saying what I really wanted to say.

We’ve all got Content Fatigue

You see, it’s actually a pretty horrendous time to be a content marketer.

Everybody has a brand, and everybody is using content marketing to shove it down our throats. My local greengrocer has a YouTube channel with 20k followers.

And I’m not hating on that at all, but we do have to grapple with the fact that when everybody is producing content, the content itself stops being an advantage. It becomes the standard. And the standard is easy to overlook.

Right now, consumers are seeing 938523 brand messages a day. We’re getting them on our phones, our laptops, our tablets, our watches, and even, in some particularly desperate cases, our smart TVs or fridges. There is literally no escaping content.

And it’s creating content fatigue en masse.

We know it is, because we see younger generations shunning social media and limiting screen time. We see organic reach falling across the board. We see Hubspot listing "standing out in increasingly crowded feeds" as one of marketers' biggest challenges in 2026.

And everyone on these feeds is trying to appease the same algorithm. And these algorithms are complex, strict, and for some reason, secret.

When one creator succeeds, everybody has to rush to replicate that format/vibe/message/tone/whatever else and get in on the action. Prioritise short-form. Keep the font at the bottom of the screen. Add a visual hook. Add an on-screen text hook. Say something controversial. Make it rage bait. Simplify your captions. Do what the top accounts are doing. Jump on this trend. Duplicate and repeat.

It’s why everything looks so incredibly same-y right now. And that, my friend, is the crux of the whole issue.

Everybody’s doing what everybody else is doing

“What everyone else is doing” won’t make your audience feel anything.

It won’t tell them anything about you, beyond the fact that you’re online and generally adequate in your field (or as adequate as the next person, right?). It won’t stop the scroll of someone who has a thousand other brand messages to scroll through and also probably a screen time limit about to pop up at any second. It won’t be recognisable. In fact, it can’t be recognisable, period.

And the stakes are through the roof in 2026, because your audience isn’t willing to follow 100+ brands.

They're pruning, unsubscribing, muting, and using screen time limits. They’re engaging in group chats and WhatsApp communities they know and trust. They’re going back to newsletters, but they’re being selective about it. They’re following twenty people intentionally instead of hundreds casually.

And that means you have to become one of the few voices your audience chooses to keep around.

Why we follow people

As an exercise, have a quick think about why you’d ever choose to follow someone.

It’s never because of their perfect grammar or their sentence structure or the way they chose to format their sentences. It’s because you like the human on the other side of the screen.

What’s a slightly long-winded caption among friends if it’s saying something interesting? What’s a bit of slang or dialect if it makes your favorite brand more relatable? People will accept a lot of ‘imperfection’ from people they recognise and rate.

But when you publish a sanitised, generic blog you don’t really care about, it shows. When you say what you think you should be saying to appease the algorithm, it shows. When you’re overwhelmed with the sheer volume of content you think you need to put out there and you’re actually pretty sick of the whole thing, it shows. When you get AI to write your newsletter, it shows.

All of these things will tick a box. They’ll keep the lights on. They might even generate a few results, if you’re lucky. But they won’t show anyone who you are. They won’t give anyone anything unique to hang on to. They won’t be a reason for anyone to choose you to keep around.

You, but on a really, really good day

In 2026, you can be anything but generic.

Your audience has a whole infinite scroll worth of generic in their pockets. They need something different. Something genuinely interesting (not marketing interesting). It’s got to be specific, it’s got to be from you, and it’s got to be real.

Buttttttt, there is a catch.

Real and authentic and interesting does not mean raw, unpolished, or careless.

There are still platforms to figure out and audiences to research and psychology to tap into. All that stuff isn’t going away. And it’s not enough to show up and be real if you’re being real in the totally wrong places, in front of the wrong audiences, and coming across kind of weird or unprofessional in the process.

Which brings me to my conclusion. The takeaway from 8 years of content marketing that I’m now basing my whole career on:

You have to show up like yourself, but you have to do it with marketing prowess. You have to show up like yourself, with a deep understanding of your messages. Yourself, with a tone of voice that makes it easy for your audience to engage. Yourself, on your best day.

The goal isn't more content. It's becoming one of the few brands people actively choose to keep around. That's why I don't help people create more content… I help them sound like themselves, on a really, really good day.

Everything in the Ellen Barr Content ecosystem is designed with that in mind. So take a browse, grab a free resource, or sign up to the newsletter for some copywriting advice and insights sent straight to your inbox every fortnight. And if you want to take it a step further, my contact form is always open.

Thanks for being here,

Ellen x