Welcome! Before you dive into this week’s newsletter, a few quick reminders:

⚡️ For business owners, did you know I offer 1:1 marketing sessions covering Instagram/LinkedIn/email? Find out more and book here.

✨ This month, I’m running ‘How To Master LinkedIn’, an online 2-part workshop with the British Institute of Interior Design.

✨ Client spotlight: I’ve been working with UN Women UK over the past few months, managing their Instagram and LinkedIn accounts. It’s been a privilege working on such important campaigns and finding creative ways to encourage engagement and donations.

What does the obsession with 2016 mean for freelancers trying to market themselves in 2026?

Let’s rewind for a second. Just in case you’ve been living under an algorithm-obscuring rock, the internet is having a moment with the “2026 is 2016” trend; photos and memories shared from a time that feels — compared to now, at least — simpler.

A year when photos alone could perform well on Instagram. When the internet felt more playful, less polarised. When we knew nothing of a global pandemic. When the reality of Brexit and Trump hadn’t properly kicked in.

This obsession with nostalgia trend isn’t new. We’ve seen it play out on Instagram and TikTok and Substack in the “analog life” trend. In the face of AI, many are resisting by embracing messy or manual activities. They’re picking up hobbies that ChatGPT could never (knitting, scrapbooking, journalling). They’re putting limits on screen time or forgoing smartphones altogether, and instead spending time with friends, exercising, and choosing small offline rituals that are more tangible, more sensory, more mentally enriching.

And when you zoom out, you can see that same pushback showing up in the content that’s performing best right now.

That content is photos. More specifically, camera-phone photos.

Not because professional imagery has stopped working (it hasn’t), but because in a world full of polished content and increasing amounts of altered content/AI slop, phone photos signal something people are craving again: real life.

Why “real” is doing the heavy lifting

When so much content is polished, templated, filtered, or machine-made, a normal phone photo reads as a small marker of credibility. It’s familiar because it’s a style of photography we recognise. Our galleries are full of images a little too over-sharpened, a little too saturated, because most of us don’t know our way around our phone’s camera settings and don’t spend very long, if at all, thinking about framing, composition, foreground/background separation, bokeh, ISO, etc.

Now, I’m not saying that as AI gets increasingly more sophisticated it won’t eventually be able to replicate a perfectly imperfect selfie. I’m sure it will. But right now, most people can still feel the difference between something captured in-the-moment and something manufactured to look that way — and that’s why phone photos are doing so well.

“But I’m not a lifestyle creator”

Good. You don’t need to be.

This isn’t an encouragement to start living a beautifully curated life that you spend hours documenting — and it’s definitely not a directive to post only selfies. It’s a reminder that most freelancers are sitting on a huge marketing asset they underuse: visible, imperfect proof of what goes into the day-to-day running of their business.

And I know that this often isn’t very ‘attractive’. It probably involves sitting at your desk, commuting to offices and meetings and projects, waiting for people in coffee shops. That’s great! Get used to taking photos of these moments through your week and you’ve got the perfect backdrop to trust-building content.

Set up a system for success

As I said in a LinkedIn workshop last week, the key to making this whole thing easier and more likely to succeed is to get into the habit of taking more photos on your phone as you go about your week.

That’s the first habit to form. The second is adding these photos into a dedicated folder on your phone, so that you don’t lose hours and hours of your one wild and precious life to sifting through your gallery trying to find that photo you swore you took at that meeting last week....

Make publishing even speedier with this nifty trick

Once you get into the habit of taking photos as you move through your week, the next thing to do is turn these photos into a Carousel.

But you’re not going to spend hours tinkering in Canva. You’re going to write out the copy for each slide in your Notes app, a Google Doc, wherever you prefer. Then you’re going to open up Instagram Stories, add one of the photos you’ve taken recently, and copy-paste the first line of the Carousel onto the image.

Save that image down to your camera roll and repeat the process until you’ve worked your way through all the copy. Now, you’re ready to publish these saved Story slides as a Carousel post!

What about Reels?

If you feel more comfortable creating Reels than taking photos, do that! Video is still the best way to grow on Instagram (and TikTok) in 2026, and the same rules apply — footage that features you, captured on your phone, will almost always perform better than anything else.

Just look at Sheerluxe’s recent content – almost every post features an employee taking to camera. Why? Because for the user, it feels like a 1:1 conversation with a real human being.

Are you going to share more camera-phone photos in 2026?

Thank you so much for reading!

If you have any thoughts about today’s topic — perhaps you’ve been sharing more camera-phone photos with interesting results? — let me know! I love hearing from you.

Until next time,

Bella xo

P.S. 👋🏼 If you're a freelancer (or aspire to be one!), I want to let you know that my Substack has had a bit of a makeover. It’s now more focused on supporting freelancers and it’s where I’m sharing my most practical, behind-the-scenes guidance on marketing yourself, finding clients, and building a freelance business that actually feels sustainable. I send out 2x emails per week (Wednesdays and Sundays). If you’d like to join me over there, you can subscribe here.

And if not — no worries. You’ll still continue to get 1–2 newsletters per month here about marketing/business/self-employed life, as you always have 🤍