🫟 Seven years of placeholder

My website went live in 2019. I built it as a copywriting exercise during my Copyhackers certification, telling myself it was temporary.

July 2026, it was still there. Seven years of placeholder. 😬

Every time my services shifted, I’d patch a line here or there. The way you keep a car running with tape, bubble gum, and positive vibes.

Why the delay?

I know how that sounds, given what I do for a living. In a typical year, I go through 5-7 messaging and copy projects for clients.

For a long time I blamed being busy. The honest answer is that I wasn’t sure what the site was supposed to say.

Part of it was drift: my services had moved on and the page hadn’t.

But the bigger reason was doubt. My site listed what I do, though I wasn’t sure I could clearly articulate what a client walks away with, or why any of it was worth paying for, from their perspective. I had a hunch, but never a finding, because I’d never run structured research on my own brand.

Neither problem was urgent. That’s the trap. Nothing breaks, nobody complains. There’s always a more pressing task. So I kept telling myself I’d get to it once things calmed down.

Insert cinematic voice-over: Little did she know things would never calm down.

Where the language actually lives

The doubt is what made the research unavoidable. I couldn’t write my way out of a question about what clients value until I actually looked at real-life answers. So I went digging: old proposals, past projects, the emails where clients described what had changed for them. Almost none of it was new. It had just never sat in one place.

If you’re doing this for a company, the same material is sitting around you:

• Your existing clients. Past projects, proposals, the messages where people told you what they got out of the work.
• The clients you want. No clients yet? The buyers of comparable products will tell you what they’re shopping for and why they need it.
• Your own team. Salespeople hear the real words every week, and so does anyone who’s sat on a discovery call. You need to extract that tacit knowledge.

You’re almost never starting from zero. The words are scattered across inboxes, calls, and people’s heads, waiting to be gathered.

Three frameworks, each strong in its way

Once you have the raw material, you need something to do with it. I lean on three frameworks for that: April Dunford’s positioning work, Fletch PMM’s messaging canvas, and Louis Grenier’s STFO methodology. They come at the same problem from different angles, and the angle tells you which to reach for.

Dunford is where I start when a business already has customers and needs to work out which market it’s competing in. Fletch is for when you already have the raw material in hand and need to codify it into the words that go on the page. STFO is the most personality-driven of the three: it builds your differentiation from your core convictions all the way out to how the brand looks and sounds.

What they share is the useful part: each one forces you to ask the awkward questions you might otherwise skip: Who are you competing with, including the option of doing nothing? What can you say that your competitors can’t? Who cares enough to be the right customer?

So pick the one that fits your situation, the one you’ll actually finish, or honestly the one you just like best. Then use it for what it’s good at: clarify your positioning and build a messaging framework, the set of messages you reach for whenever you write anything customer-facing.

The tidy one-line positioning statement is where most people stop. Don’t take the bait!

Then the copy

The rewrite I’d been dodging finally moved after I had the research and thought through its implications with a structure in place.

It still took work, but this time I knew what I was aiming at.

When a happy client describes what working with me did for them, it comes out close to this: “She gets you clear on what you actually stand for, makes it live across your content, and leaves your team able to run it.” That’s the research boiled down to the essence I hold every piece of copy up against. Every webpage needs to bring the reader back to this point.

For months I’d been convinced I had a copy problem. I’d sit down, stall within the hour, and assume I was blocked, or tired, or just bad at my own marketing. Turns out, I just wasn’t clear on what I wanted to say. And that came from customer research.

***

So when your copy keeps stalling, look one level up. Is the messaging clear? And underneath it, is the positioning settled: who you’re for, what you stand for? If not, that’s your real project.

If you want the smallest possible start, it’s this: next time you’re in your inbox, notice the phrases where a client described what changed for them. That’s where your messaging begins.

None of this was fun. It was the hardest project I’ve taken on this year (I had THE WORST customer, I hate her!), mostly because I did it alone: no deadline, no one to work on this together with. But I’m happy with where it landed.

In fact, I’d like more people to get to this point.

This is why I’m running the whole process in a guided cohort for two weeks, starting August 24. You bring your own brand, I bring the structure and the feedback, and you leave with a clear v1 of your full messaging framework. Summer is when I finally had room for this foundational work. I’m hoping that’s true for you too.

The groundwork matters,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

10 Creative Ways to Write with AI (Without Losing Your Soul) | Ten genuinely creative uses of AI in writing you should try. The one I loved: feed it your own data and ask it to surface the outliers and odd patterns worth writing about. His “vibewriting” experiment is a fun one, too.

Content Distribution Strategy: How to Reach B2B Buyers (and the AI Systems They Trust) in 2026 | In 2026, the hard part of content is distribution. This post builds it into a five-layer stack: spread each piece across owned channels, communities like Reddit and LinkedIn, video, and review sites, then treat every long-form asset as raw material you cut into multiple formats.

CRO Case study: How we increased conversions by 14% by ignoring our competitors | Talia Wolf’s team mined Reddit threads and reviews and found the big question about choosing a moving company is who you can trust. Reframing the messaging from price to safety lifted conversions 14%, a clean example of research pointing to the real driver.

👀 Two for fun

This deep-dive into a “perfect” game of Tetris | A nerdy look at what “maxing out Tetris” actually means, and a great look at how people obsess over the outer limits of a decades-old game.

This case for making “good enough” decisions | As someone who over-researches everything, I found the idea of “satisficing” oddly freeing.

🐈 Weekly cat

The factory is at full capacity.