Writing & strategy samples

How I think, shown in full.

Four pieces, in full: the plan, the post, the sequence, and the briefs I would hand a writer. Every sample here is spec, built for a hypothetical brand to demonstrate methodology. The real client programs, with real numbers, are in case studies.

Sample 01 Content strategy

"Cadence," a two-quarter organic plan

How I decide what is worth publishing before anyone writes it, and how I would know whether it moved anything.

SpecContent-operations SaaS · Goal: qualified trial signups from organic, no added paid spend

The problem we solve for the buyer

Marketing teams don't search for "content operations software." They search the pain: missed deadlines, scattered calendars, approvals stuck in DMs. So the plan buys the problem language first and introduces the product second, usually in the last third of the piece.

Audience and intent

Segment	What they search	What we publish
IC marketer (drowning)	"content calendar template"	Templates and how-to guides
Marketing manager (evaluating)	"content workflow tools"	Comparison and use-case content
Head of marketing (deciding)	"content operations ROI"	Case studies and ROI breakdowns

Content pillars

Three pillars, deliberately uneven. Most of the volume goes to planning, because that is where the search demand actually is: calendars, briefs, templates. A smaller run covers production speed and approvals, aimed at people already using a tool and unhappy with it. The thinnest pillar is measurement and ROI, which almost nobody searches for and every head of marketing asks about on the call.

Channel logic

Search does the compounding: pillar pages with clusters underneath them. YouTube is here because the product is a workflow, and a workflow is faster to show than to describe. Email is the only channel with a conversion job, turning template downloaders into trials. One production pass feeds all three.

How we measure it

Leading: organic sessions, video watch time, template downloads. Lagging: organic-attributed trial signups, trial-to-paid rate. Monthly review, and any format that has not moved a leading indicator in two cycles comes out of the calendar.

Sample 02 Writing

An SEO blog post, top of funnel

Written for a keyword, and still worth reading if you found it some other way.

SpecKeyword: how to plan a content calendar · Informational · CTA: free template to trial

The post

How to Plan a Content Calendar That Actually Survives Q4

Every content calendar looks great in January. The test is October, when three launches collide, two people are out sick, and the tidy doc you built in a quiet week is the only thing between you and a missed quarter. That's when most calendars quietly fall apart. The planning was fine. It was done in a quiet week, for a quiet week.

Start with the goal, not the grid. Write down the one number this quarter has to move, then make every slot trace back to it. If a planned piece can't name the metric it serves, it comes out of the calendar.

Build in slack before you need it. A calendar packed to 100% breaks on contact with reality. Leave one open slot per cycle on purpose. Something unplanned lands every quarter. The open slot is where it goes.

Make the handoff visible. Most of the delay in a content calendar happens in the gap between two people, where nothing is anyone's job yet. Put the handoff on the calendar as its own row, with a name on it.

Why it ranks. Answers the query in the first 40 words, uses the keyword naturally in the H1, the intro, and the close, and earns the link with a genuine template.

Sample 03 Writing

A four-email nurture sequence

Lifecycle copy with the branching and the exit condition specified, so someone could actually go build it.

SpecTrigger: downloaded the calendar template · Goal: start a trial · Exit: trial starts

The sequence

Email 1 · immediately
Deliver the file, no fluff. One line on the single best way to use it: fill the goal cell first, everything else hangs off it.
Email 2 · day 2
Lead with the pain: calendars die in the handoff gaps, usually between the person who wrote the brief and the person who owns the deadline. Teach the ownership-column fix. No pitch in this one.
Email 3 · day 4
Bridge from template to product. The same plan, but with approvals and status live. Soft CTA to start a trial.
Email 4 · day 7 · branch: no trial yet
A before and after, one line from a customer, and the ask. If a trial starts at any point, exit into onboarding.

What I would test. Email 1 subject line, Email 3 CTA wording, day-2 send time. Benchmarked against a 45 to 55% open and 3 to 5% CTR for warm template leads.

Sample 04 Briefs

SEO and AI-search (GEO) briefs

The brief a freelance writer would actually receive from me, for the blue links and for the AI answer box.

SpecTwo briefs · Pillar and cluster, then citation in AI answers

Pillar brief: the "content calendar" topic cluster

Primary keyword: content calendar. A pillar page that internally links to a cluster, structured to own the definition box, the five components, a step-by-step build, a gated template, common mistakes, and a measurement section.

On-page: keyword in the H1, the first 100 words, one H2, and the metadata. A snippet-targeted definition block. FAQ schema. An original template asset to earn links.

GEO brief: getting cited by AI answers

Buyers now ask an assistant for a shortlist before they open a single link. SEO gets you the click. GEO gets you named inside the answer, whether or not anyone clicks at all.

Open with a direct answer, 40 to 55 words, liftable whole. Then give it a reason to lift yours instead of someone else's: original data, or a framework with a name on it. Question-shaped H2s and short paragraphs make a page easier to pull from. Schema tells the model where to look. The slow part is entity authority, which is mostly naming the brand and the author the same way everywhere until the models connect the two.

Measure it by running the target prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity on a schedule and logging every time the brand gets named. Share of voice against the competitors named alongside you is the number worth reporting. AI-referral traffic needs its own tag or it disappears into direct.

Why this brief exists. I wrote it because the SEO brief above stopped being enough on its own. Same page, same research, one more surface it has to win.

Want a sample written for your category? Ask me.

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