You Can’t Sell to Ghosts: Why the Algorithm Hates Your Lack of Soul

by Don Draper, who’s seen a thousand pitches die in a thousand conference rooms

Your Content Isn’t Bad. It’s Empty.

You’re doing everything the experts told you to do.

Posting three times a week. Scheduling it. Optimizing it. Repurposing it. Your LinkedIn is polished. Your Instagram grid is cohesive. Your newsletter goes out like clockwork.

And yet—no one’s biting.
No one’s buying.
No one cares.

You’re not being shadowbanned. You’re being ignored.

Because here’s the dirty little secret of 2025:
The algorithm doesn’t hate you.
It hates your lack of soul.

You think you feel hated? Just ask my ex-wives how they feel about me.

The Algorithm Isn’t a Machine. It’s a Mirror.

We keep talking about the algorithm like it’s HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, some cold, all-knowing overlord we’re supposed to appease.

It’s not.

The algorithm is just a reflection of the audience’s attention. It rewards what feels alive. It amplifies energy. It circulates conviction. It knows when you’re phoning it in. When you’re playing it safe. When you’re just copying what worked for someone else.

You can’t out-hack that.
You have to out-feel it.

Want engagement? Say something that actually means something.
Want followers? Be the kind of person they’d follow into the fire.

People are starving for depth in a world made of templates.
If your content doesn’t have a pulse, it’s already dead.

Your Soul Is Your Strategy

There was a time when ad men like me could sell a cigarette with a slogan. It’s Toasted, we’d say—and people believed it. But that era’s gone.

Now, people want to know who you are before they trust what you sell.

That’s where Archetypes of Success comes in. It’s not branding fluff. It’s a system for pulling your actual story out from under the rubble of “best practices” and bringing it back into the spotlight where it belongs.

Because your soul isn’t just your why. It’s your how, your what, and your who.

If your business isn’t built from that place—your place—then the algorithm will always ghost you. Because you’ll be ghosting yourself.

You don’t need another lead magnet.
You need to speak with the conviction of someone who remembers why they started this whole damn thing in the first place.

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Let’s give your story its body back. Let’s make it human again. Let’s make it heard.