I’ve got a graveyard of downloaded PDFs sitting in some folder I’ll never open again. Signed up for probably a hundred email lists over the years chasing one of them.

You’ve got the same graveyard. Everybody does. That’s what marketers do, apparently. We sign up for tons of emails.

Somewhere along the way, the lead magnet jumped the shark.

So the last couple years, I’ve been figuring out what I could actually do with AI instead of grinding out another gated PDF nobody asked for. Not chasing a trend. Just seeing what was possible.

What I landed on, I’ve started calling lead assets.

I don’t have a cleaner word for it yet. Something about the word “magnet” feels transactional — give me your email, take this PDF, we both pretend it was a fair trade. An asset is different. It sits there. It works on its own. It brings people into your orbit (still hunting for a better word than orbit, but it’s close) without asking anything of them first.

Some of what I built is genuinely useful. Some of it’s a prototype, me finding out what these tools could do when I pointed them at something specific instead of something generic.

Fourteen of them live on the free page now. A Clarity Coach. A Brand Legacy Quiz. A Remarkable Content Copilot. A Micro Case Study builder. A wrestling storytelling quiz, because of course there’s a wrestling storytelling quiz. An AI Income Slot Machine. A couple of wrestling simulators. A noir detective story, if that’s your kind of thing. Tools built around 93 Ways to Use Your Founder Story.

And a Bigfoot storybook.

I wanted to see if I could take a short story and turn it into something you flip through, page by page, right there on the website. Turns out I could. It’s not perfect. I know exactly where I’d tighten it if I sat with it again. But it’s mine, it’s IP nobody else has, and it’s a lot more fun to click through than a PDF you forgot you downloaded.

The Bigfoot story was originally published on my Substack. I decided to find different ways to repurpose and I did a comic type storybook. Using a little code from one of the AI tools, I turned it into a Bigfoot storybook.

I love repurposing content!

The thread running under all fourteen lead assets is all about being interactive. Not because interactive is a buzzword — because a PDF just sits there, and a tool you actually use sticks with you longer.

Every one of them is still ungated. No email required. No form standing between somebody and the thing they came to try.

I’ve got some things in the works I’ll eventually gate a little, get people onto the newsletter list. But if I’m honest, that hasn’t been the focus. Building the lead assets has been the focus. The gating can wait.

And just this week, I shared one of my lead assets with someone. He asked if he could share it in his email list. Heck yeah! And he has a really good list too.

That’s kind of the whole point of building an asset instead of a magnet. It doesn’t need to pull. It just has to be worth finding.

Go ahead, check out the The Founder Story Audit. You can find it here.

Another one is the simulation game called the Fake Thought Leader.

You can see all of them at the Copyflight Free page.

Do you have lead magnets? Do you have interactive tools? Let me know.

PS: Maybe one day I will tell you about the songs I’m creating. 😁🤫

World’s Greatest Coffee

Someone landed on your About page this week and decided something about you in nine seconds.

Maybe less.

They didn’t type a question. They didn’t email you. They read a few lines, formed an opinion, and either kept going or closed the tab.

Three things got settled in that window. Whether you could be trusted. Whether you understood the problem they walked in with. Whether you were the right fit or just the first thing they found.

And a fourth one they’d never say out loud. What are your credentials?

Now something else is reading that page. It didn’t come to browse.

I’ve been talking about About pages for years.

Back when I was doing web design, I’d pull up Google Analytics for a client and there it was, almost every single time — the About page sitting at number two. Second most viewed page on the whole site.

Over the years I’ve looked at a lot of business about pages. Know what I find?

Boilerplate. Templated. Vague nonsense.

Somewhere in there I figured out what it actually was. It’s a sales asset. Nobody treated it like one, and things went on as usual.

Talia Wolf pointed at a KoMarketing study back in 2017 where 52% of people said the first thing they wanted to see on a website was the About Us page. Contact information and products landed above it. Testimonials came after. The homepage didn’t make the list at all.

That study is nine years old and nothing about it has changed. That’s not a stale number. That’s the whole argument.

What changed is who else started reading.

More than ten years ago Google adopted the entity structure. You remember it even if you didn’t know what to call it — that’s when we could finally start using synonyms in our articles instead of cramming ten versions of the same keyword into 800 words.

What we didn’t clock at the time was what it actually meant. The machine started connecting things.

So you say, my name is Todd Jones and I am the owner of Copyflight. You connect Todd Jones to Copyflight. If you look at my address, you see I'm based in Conway, Arkansas. You might see that I'm a copywriter, that I'm a brand narrative person.

And in doing so, became a subject matter expert for an article written by one of the top content marketers in the country.

Every one of those is a thread, and something on the other end is tying them together.

The machines think a little more like people now than they did twenty years ago when we were all losing sleep over keyword volume.

Which means the thing we used to wave off — brand, the fuzzy business nobody could get into a spreadsheet — turned into something critical. Attribution was always bad at measuring brand. Now brand is what decides whether you get named at all.

published a piece on exactly this yesterday. When she runs GEO audits, she says the About page shows up consistently among the most-cited pages for a business’s target prompts. She’s got the report to go with it.

Check out what she says here:

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini often check official About pages to verify whether a brand is worth recommending. In my GEO audits, I always see a business “About” page as one of the most cited pages for target prompts.

2017 tells you what people wanted. Yesterday tells you what the machines are actually pulling.

One of my favorite stories is in Elf.

Buddy walks into New York City for the first time. Grown man, yellow tights, curly-toed shoes. He passes a coffee shop with a sign in the window — World’s Greatest Coffee — and he goes barreling inside hollering congratulations at everybody in the place. You did it! You created the world’s greatest coffee!

He believed the sign. Up at the North Pole a claim like that was true. Santa really does have the best hot chocolate anybody’s ever had.

We are not Buddy.

Best CRM. Best consultant. Best agency. Best whatever it is you’re in the business of. Tell me that and you’d better have something standing behind it. Best burger in town needs an as-voted-by and a name attached.

Ann’s read is the models have the same reflex we do. They tend to slide right past “we’re the best at X” and pick up the factual claim instead — the one with a number and a year in it. Trusted by this many customers since this year.

Buddy believed the sign. Nobody else does.

Google asked us to think about this a while back when they rolled out E-E-A-T. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness.

My friend Brendan Hufford said on LinkedIn he doesn’t trust Google about anything.

I understand that and I mostly agree with him. This one was worth listening to anyway. (It’s a frame, not a checklist. Nobody’s earning a grade on it by fixing their Core Web Vitals.)

A good About page answers all four.

Ann calls the evidence trust signals — years in business, partnerships with known entities, certifications, notable clients, awards, mentions in real publications, testimonials from people who actually exist. Her sharpest note is her smallest one.

Mentions need names and links, not just logos. That grayed-out as-seen-in bar sitting on your homepage isn’t proof of anything. It’s decoration.

Anything copy related is an assembly, and when I build an About page I’m assembling six things.

There’s the plot, which is your story — origin, pivot, founder. There’s purpose, which is your mission and values, and if a value actually matters to you there’s a story behind why. You didn’t pick it off a list somebody put on a whiteboard because it sounded good. There’s promise, what a client can expect from you. There’s publicity, the mentions and features and speaking. There’s proof, the testimonials and case studies and results. And there’s process, your method — enough that they know you’ve got one, not so much that you’ve handed it over.

Publicity and proof are where Ann’s trust signals live.

The one thing she names that I don’t is use cases. Say plainly which problems you solve and for who. A person, a problem, what changed. That’s what tells a model which prompts you belong in.

We left the About page to chance.

We left the About page to chance. Paint by numbers, fill in the blanks, move on.

And somewhere in there we forgot there were actual reasons behind what we do. Your brand is more than the colors and the logo. Everything sitting behind those is the brand, and it means something.

People have always wanted to know who’s behind a thing. Plenty of businesses tried to stay anonymous. That’s over.

Because the models don’t take your word for it. They start on your About page and then they go verify it somewhere else.

Same as you would. You don’t hire the roofer because the roofer says he’s good.

Aleyda Solís studied fifteen SaaS brands this summer and found somewhere between 84 and 93% of the AI citation weight came from sites that weren’t theirs.

Your About page is the ground source. It isn’t the verdict.

So you’re tying in E-E-A-T. You’re tying in the credibility signals. But you’re also tying in connection, and connection is where the story comes from.

I’m not asking for a novel. I’m not even asking for the hero’s journey — an About page hasn’t got the room. If your story runs long, put a snippet up and link out to the full thing on its own page.

The About page was never a formality. It’s the one page where you get to say what you are before somebody else decides for you.

Now there are two readers. Both of them came to check.

I created a tool to help you build one of the 6Ps. You can access that at my website.

Stay motivated. Keep telling stories.

—Todd

You can’t info-mate someone to action.

I’ve been saying that for a while now. The phrase probably deserves more nuance, but basically it comes down to this: information is not enough to get someone to move.

If it were, putting facts in front of someone would change what they do. And to be fair, sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t. We’re emotionally invested in our own thoughts and actions.

Look at it another way. You can have all the info in the world — all that thin data — but if you can’t analyze it, synthesize it, and act on it, you just have info.

What B2B Blog Posts Forgot

(Source: An Iron Will, Orison Swett Marden, 1901 — public domain)

A few years back I noticed that blog posts were massive info dumps with a structure. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it was rare to see one create movement.

I saw posts with little to no intro. A sentence or two, but nothing to hook the reader.

Like, man — do you not want people to read and act on your article?

We were stuck writing content for machines controlled by Google and the other search engines.

When I started thinking about the best literature, it was full of storytelling. Persuasion. Metaphor. Simile. Evidence. And often, inspiration.

Those things were missing from B2B blog posts.

I once read a book called An Iron Will, in which the author built his entire thesis by telling story after story. It was published in 1901. Short book. Made its point. Grabbed inspirational story after inspirational story to prove the thesis.

Surely in today’s world people would roll their eyes at it. It’s just a bunch of stories and anecdotes.

How REO Became Remarkable

So I started thinking about what actually makes good content good.

I brainstormed, and what came out first was the REO Framework:

• R — Relevant

• E — Engaging

• O — Original

When I talk about Original in the Remarkable Content System, I mean original thought. A unique point of view — a uPOV. Original sources and original research.

I kept working on it and added Inspirational and Transformational. Because REOIT sounds weird, I changed it to the Remarkable Framework.

I finally settled on the Remarkable Content System. Bundled it. Put it on Gumroad.

I’m Not the Only One Saying This

(Source: The 4 E’s of Content: Educate, Engage, Entertain, Empower — Ross Simmonds)

I’m not the only person pointing at content that’s heavy on machine fodder and light on human fodder. Ross Simmonds has been saying it for years.

His version: content needs to Educate, Engage, Entertain, and Empower.

Sounds familiar.

Commodity vs. Non-Commodity

Google calls this kind of content non-commodity content, and puts it up against the overly informational, research-paper-style stuff — commodity content.

The Non-Commodity Brand Strategy - a micro course

In other words: our LLM systems synthesize commodity content. And suddenly there’s a massive drop in traffic to the sites that relied on commodity content exclusively for visibility.

The AI era didn’t create that problem. It exposed it. Then amplified it.

Now people are scrambling to get the traffic back, but that’s the wrong issue. Brands need to create content that’s worth sharing. Content that’s memorable.

What I’m sensing instead is more cold outreach. More cold LinkedIn DMs. More cold emails. More salesy technique, all of it trying to hit this quarter’s number.

The Substack Post That Stopped Me

(Source: Retirement Is the Biggest Identity Trap We Built — Neela, WorkmanShit)

On Tuesday I got a Substack in my inbox that stopped me in my tracks.

The title didn’t do it — though it’s a fascinating thought. The first few lines did it. She set a scene.

“My father called me at 4:42 am.”

From there she lays out what that hour does to you when it’s a parent’s name on the screen. Twenty-three years of him never remembering the time difference. The panic that arrives before you’ve even answered, already picturing who the bad news is about.

My family doesn’t live in another country, hours away. I still related. She set a scene and I felt it. I could see it in my mind.

That’s a classic introductory hook.

What followed was an amazing narrative journey with her thesis held inside the fold of it. And I enjoyed it. Way different than almost anything you read online these days.

I like teaching posts. But I like them more when they’re written from the perspective of what someone learned.

This one was narrative — and inside the story, Neela questioned the purpose and framing of retirement. Honestly, I agree with her. She explained how retirement became what it is today with, what else, a story.

She even used a song in the article. Actually, she used two! Sesame Street and Johnny Paycheck for the win.

She circled back to her dad, too, by the way.

Neela calls purpose a bit of a red herring. A decoy. You can convince yourself you have it or you don’t, and nobody can prove otherwise. What people actually lose, she says, is interruption. Nobody needs a decision from you anymore. Nobody stops you in the hallway.

I’d say those two live next door to each other. Purpose is the thing you can’t measure. Interruption is the thing you can hand somebody.

I see it every day with my mom’s generation. Heck, even my generation — GenX — is starting to find fewer people interested in what we can do. And let me tell you, we can do a lot. And have.

She challenged an assumption about retirement and used narrative to bring us along on her journey.

Stellar.

That is a great example of remarkable content.

The Part I’m Still Chewing On

Visibility seems shaky these days in the online world. I think there’s a way to break through it, but that’s a story for another day.

Either way, we’ll fare better when we try to create more remarkable content.

Because information doesn’t move people. Story does. That’s not decoration — that’s the whole load-bearing wall.

Stay motivated. Keep telling stories.

tej

What’s the last piece of content that actually stopped you — and do you know why it worked? Hit reply. I want to see it.

We all have it.

A folder of PDFs we never look at. A graveyard of downloadables we grabbed for an email newsletter we may or may not still be on.

I remember when we started doing this. Get this free eBook for your email address. Pretty exciting. Free!

Go ahead bro… go ahead ma’am. Gimme that free eBook.

We realized after a while that it was just a really long blog post. Mostly. Not always. How many did you download that just didn’t work for you? Disappointment.

Once in a while I downloaded one that was worth it. Something from Copyblogger. Maybe an industry report. Maybe it was worth it, maybe not.

I think the lead magnet concept may be passing.

Most short courses can be an AI assistant tool now. More interactive, better results.

So I’ve stopped calling them lead magnets. I think of them as lead assets. You build the asset, you distribute it, and it pulls people into your ecosystem.

Your front porch, as it were.

The Front Porch, Defined

A front porch is the entry point to your ecosystem. It’s where people come to learn more about you, interact with your ideas, and decide whether full entry is worth the price of admission.

Some would call it a funnel. But customer paths aren’t linear.

Some would call it an audience, or a community. Those aren’t quite right either.

Jessica Jalowiec argues the clean awareness → consideration → conversion model doesn’t match how people actually deal with brands now, especially Gen Z. Her replacement image is the Brand Vortex — less a path you walk, more a pull you get caught in.

Your Marketing Funnel Is Dead. Thanks, Gen Z — Jessica Jalowiec

I like that. Though I’d separate the two things.

The porch is what you build. The pull is what happens when the porch is any good.

So the question isn’t how do I move people down the funnel. It’s how do I get them onto the porch — and once they’re sitting there, how do I persuade them closer to the center?

Three ways I’ve been working on.

1. Diagnostic Tools

Use AI to build diagnostic tools that help people move to the next step.

I’ve created a few, and I can tell you — this is a hot lead asset right now. I’ve had a couple of creators emailing me about building them.

Diagnostic tools serve a unique purpose. They let the business owner step into your shoes as the consultant and diagnose the issue themselves. Once they see the need, they’re ready to move.

That’s the whole trick. You’re not telling someone their strategy has holes. You’re handing them the flashlight.

2. Business Fables and Simulation Games

I created a world, sort of.

You may have read the Simple Sam stories at StoryVault. Maybe an issue of Copy Hill. I even made a story about Bigfoot writing his own website. There are more. They just aren’t moving along that well yet.

In all, I call it Jonesworld. I even made a song about it.

I wasn’t really headed nowhere
Just cut off the highway for a break
Saw a place called Darnell’s Coffee
Figured I’d fix a small mistake
Same men at the same old table
Like they’d been there since day one
Nobody asked me where I was from
Just nodded like I’d already come

I’m quite fond of business fables. I don’t understand why B2B doesn’t see them.

But here’s the thing — we buy the books. All the time.

Who Moved My Cheese? The One Minute Manager. I’m a fan of Obvious Adams.

We’ll pay for a fable. We just won’t publish one.

I’m going to toss something else in here: simulation games.

There’s no better way to engage a story than to put yourself in the shoes of the person living it. Games are an extremely lucrative business, and simulation games are too. Anyone remember The Sims?

We love putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Add a problem to solve and it gets even better.

You don’t need an overly produced simulation. A simple, fun game with a decent interface is fine. AI makes those much easier to build now. I’ve experimented and made a few — still learning how to use them to build a story scenario for potential customers.

A lot of business experts talk about storytelling. Mostly it’s a buzzword wrapped in marketing.

This is the other thing. This is storytelling somebody actually has to play.

3. Sprints, Kits, and Short-Term Cohorts

I’ve created an email course. Those are quick sprints — usually 3 to 7 days.

I also built what I called a Micro Course. It lives on a Notion page. Easy consumption. Bookmark the link, come back when you want. No delivery required.

Recently I joined a 30 in 30 Challenge with Rhonda Linn and Maria Gudelis. We learned to create Instagram carousels and were challenged to do it for 30 days straight. I learned a lot. Great experience.

What I didn’t expect was how much the format taught me.

I’d never thought about a challenge being that helpful. But what you have there is a short-term cohort. A micro course and a group learning experience at the same time.

There are a lot of ways to run a sprint. On demand. Live. Async. Free or paid — and I’d encourage you to consider a trying paid one. Because your info is worth the price.

The Wednesday Challenge

Go look at your current lead magnet.

Is it a digital paper flyer — trading somebody’s email address for a long blog post in a PDF wrapper? Or is it something they can actually use before they ever talk to you?

What would your front porch look like if you built one on purpose?

Tell me what you’ve got. I’m curious what’s working out there.

Rob Cairns messages me. Wants to do an AMA on the SDM Show. No script. He just starts throwing questions at me and I answer.

I said yes before I really thought about it.

Then the day came, and I sat there with no prep, no notes, nothing to lean on. Just Rob, a list of questions, and about 40 minutes to answer whatever came out of my mouth first.

I don’t trust that version of myself, usually. I trust the answer I’ve had time to think through, revise, tighten. Not the first thing that comes to mind.

I answered anyway. Question after question, first instinct, no do-overs.

I survived. And a few of the answers surprised even me — a handful of things came out that I didn’t plan to say, and they held up better than I expected.

A few of them:

• What I think is the biggest copywriting mistake happening right now — and it’s not a tactics problem, it’s a language problem

• A quote from wrestler Jeff Jarrett that I’ve been leaning on for years to explain bad copy in one line

• An on-the-spot process I gave Rob for how a busy business owner can actually improve their writing without sitting down to “write” every day

Somewhere in the middle of answering, it hit me — the unscripted version wasn’t worse. It was more honest. There was no time to dress it up in corporate language or hedge it into something safer.

So I stopped trying to give the “right” answer and just gave the true one.

Forty minutes of off-the-cuff answers produced stuff I might not have gotten to if I’d had a week to prepare and overthink it.

That’s not really an AMA lesson. That’s a writing lesson.

The process, if you want it.

Rob asked how a busy business owner — somebody who isn’t a “writer” and doesn’t have time to sit down and write every day — actually gets better at this.

Here’s what I told him, on the spot:

Get yourself a Loom, Neeto, or Whispr Flow account — anything that gives you a transcript. Then dictate. Talk through your thought, your idea, your take on something, out loud, unfiltered. I call it riffing.

Take that transcript to Claude or another LLM. Tell it plainly: this is my unvarnished thoughts on this subject, help me clean it up — formatting, clarity — but don’t polish out my voice.

That’s it. That’s the process. You’re not trying to become a better writer for the sake of being a better writer. You’re trying to get your thoughts out of your head and crystallized into something usable. The writing gets better as a byproduct, not the goal.

And most coaches and consultants already have hours of this material sitting in old coaching calls and consulting transcripts. That’s a content bank most people never touch.

The stuff you say without thinking is usually the stuff worth keeping. That’s true in an AMA. It’s true in your first draft. It’s true in the emails you almost don’t send because they feel too plain, too honest, too unpolished.

You don’t need better answers. You need to stop editing yourself before you even get the real one out.

Quotes from the show:

On the Essence of Copywriting

The Three Most Important Things in Copy

On Writing for Humans vs. AI or SEO

On Avoiding Corporate Jargon

On Improving Writing as a Busy Business Owner

Highlights

• ✍️ Copywriting is the foundational sales tool using words to attract, nurture, and close customers.

• 🧠 Knowing your target audience and brand identity are the top priorities in effective copywriting.

• 📖 Storytelling builds trust through emotional engagement, leveraging oxytocin, the “love hormone.”

• 🤖 Write primarily for humans, not just AI or search engines, but be mindful of SEO and AI’s evolving role.

• 🚫 Avoid corporate jargon—it confuses and alienates customers, reducing conversion rates.

• 🎙️ Voice-to-text tools (like Whisper Flow) plus AI editing offer a practical path for busy professionals.

• 💡 Use AI platforms (Claude, ChatGPT) strategically to polish content while preserving authentic voice.

Practical Writing Tips for Busy Consultants

• Write regularly, but realistically: Although daily writing improves skills, I acknowledge that consultants are busy. Using voice-to-text and transcript editing helps bypass the need to write continuously.

• Clarity over complexity: Avoid corporate jargon and fancy language. Speak as if conversing with a person at a local coffee shop or pub to maintain approachability.

• Iterate and revise: Writing clarifies thoughts. The process of writing—even from rough drafts or transcripts—helps consultants crystallize their ideas and improve their communication.

Tools and Resources Highlighted

• Transcription tools: Whisper Flow, Loom, Neato – to capture spoken ideas.

• AI writing assistants: Claude (preferred by me), ChatGPT, Gemini – to edit and restructure content.

• Content management: Use note-taking apps or databases like Notion to organize and build content libraries.

• Ghostwriting option: Some consultants may opt for professional ghostwriters to craft newsletters, books, or social media content based on their ideas.

The full episode with Rob is up — link below. Fair warning, it’s unscripted, so it’s messier than my usual stuff. That’s kind of the point.

→ SDM Show Episode 675 with me

P.S. — When’s the last time you gave an honest, unscripted answer and it turned out better than the version you would’ve prepared?

Downloadable Tips

Click below to download tips from the podcast episode.

Copyflight Writing Process Guide

143KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Copyflight Writing Process Guide

Download

There are a lot of books about storytelling in business, but mostly they don’t help me. Sure, they talk about marketing and that stuff, but that’s sort of where they leave off.

Now, there is definitely something important about narrative and marketing. I built an entire model around it, but the specific task of storytelling gets left behind.

To be fair there are a few business books about storytelling that have helped, but often they come from copywriters. Like David Garfinkel. You should really check out his book “The Persuasion Story Code.”

I also enjoyed reading Kindra Hall and Karen Eber’s books, but really, learning the soul of storytelling has come from various places, outside of business.

So, here are several places I learned about storytelling not in business.

1. The hills of Arkansas. Well, just about any rural community in this country will tell you about storytelling. Whether it’s the kid from your hometown who made it all the way to the big leagues or the veteran race car driver. Maybe it’s all the summers you spent going to the video store or shooting fireworks for the Fourth of July.

The stories that are passed down from generation to generation are plentiful in the hills of Arkansas. Both of my grandpas shared stories and love for something like music.

I wrote a lot about this in my book Musings from an Arkansas Storyteller.

2. Small businesses. Absolutely. Small businesses run on stories. People raised families this way and they are powered by stories. Like the hamburger joint in Fort Worth, TX that started as a small community grocery store decades ago. Maybe the guy who ran the barber shop in my hometown. Then there is the BBQ joint in Marianna, AR serving some of the best BBQ in the region for folks able to get there before it runs out.

3. Professional wrestling. This one is near and dear to my heart. You know how I am. I watch wrestling documentaries as much as I watch the shows now. It might be about the legendary Von Erich family or a story about Bret Hart. Perhaps I am remembering the days when I would watch President Jimmy Carter’s favorite wrestler, Mr. Wrestling II, from Georgia Championship Wrestling. He attended the White House one time. With his mask!

The stories and characters are legendary, as well as the evolution of sports entertainment.

4. Music. Oh my goodness, a simple spark can put me right inside a song. Like earlier when I thought of Miss Bell’s sweet tea. That comes from the country song “Good Directions” by Billy Currington.

And can anyone tell me who the heck Donna is in “Who’s Holding Donna Now?” recorded by El DeBarge in the 1980s? Seriously.

I love a good music documentary too. I wanna know about Led Zeppelin and Bad Company or The Highwaymen. Tell me more about the legend of ZZ Top. Let’s go! And I was glued when I watched the documentary It All Begins With a Song.

And perhaps one of my favorite stories is Dennis Linde, who created a fictional town that produced top hits like “Goodbye Earl,” “John Deere Green,” and “Bubba Shot the Jukebox.”

5. Movies and cinema. I just wrapped up watching Season 4 of Dark Winds, which I am a fan of. I found myself falling in love with all the characters. In one of the last scenes of the show, Emma comes back to see her husband, Joe Leaphorn. I won’t tell you what happened, but I was shedding a tear for this couple. I am rooting for them even though the odds look long for them staying together.

The other show I have going is The Blacklist. I sort of fell for both Raymond Reddington and Elizabeth Keen. I watch more shows these days than movies, but I have really enjoyed movies over the years as well. We all have that one movie that we stop and watch when scrolling through the channels.

Movies teach us about pacing, tension, and even hooks — because they do such a great job of hooking us in the beginning.

6. Church. That’s right, church. In church you hear stories, both of the people who are in the church as well as the stories in the Bible. Large parts of the Bible are, in fact, a continuous narrative. Stories of old teach us about life, faith, resilience, and community.

And those very values play out within our congregations. It’s messy sometimes because we are human and far from perfect. We make mistakes. We hurt each other, we mourn with each other, and we celebrate with each other. And that’s how it should be.

7. The table. I use table as a metaphor here. I am talking about “breaking bread,” or sharing a meal or a coffee or a drink with someone. For years I would share coffee and French bread with my friend Aliou. We would work on solving the world’s problems as good friends do. We also shared meals together, laughter, and so many other experiences in life. The table is also set for other types of communities and our families.

No Thanksgiving is complete — at least here — without reminiscing about years past. There is always a whole lot of “remember when...” going on at the Thanksgiving table. A story of another time, and we laugh, or we cry, or we sigh.

It is a shared experience. Stories connect us — whether it’s at a table, in community, in music, in an imaginary world, or even here, in the hills of Arkansas.

What about you? What has taught you the most about storytelling?

And still, how does this affect how we do life? Business?

Note: some of the images were generated with AI using whatever Substack uses.

Last week we looked at my SPARC Formula for storytelling. Just a reminder, the formula lays out like this:

S – Setting / Status Quo: Planting the story’s feet in a relatable baseline reality.

P – Provocation: The precise spark that disrupts the peace and forces a hard choice.

A – Adversity: The back-to-the-wall peak moment of tension where everything hangs in the balance.

R – Rally: The comeback. The hot tag where momentum shifts.

C – Conclusion: The new normal established and the lasting infrastructure left behind.

I believe storytelling is not decoration — it’s infrastructure. I’ve said that before. It’s why I built the Legacy Story Framework.

I’ve been building systems and frameworks around this idea, and leaning into storytelling as a discipline, since 2016.

Often, the word “storytelling” gets treated like a buzzword — something B2B boardrooms wave off as fluff while B2C brands are already using it to move billions of dollars. That gap is the opportunity.

As a fractional consultant or founder, there’s no reason to dismiss the power and potency of storytelling. It’s a more powerful growth lever than most people realize.

People pay story consultants a lot of money to help them gain clarity, earn trust, and build authority. If those things matter to you, storytelling will matter too.

In today's Wednesday Vault, I'm taking you on a journey through a handful of articles I've written on brand storytelling going back to 2018 — and showing you how each one can be a practical part of your consultancy.

Ready? Hop in, we’re going for a ride.

The Foundation — The 4 Pillars of Your Brand Story

(Source: 4 Pillars of Storytelling That Will Make Your Business More Magnetic)

Before writing a single word of website copy or sales messaging, you have to dig up the raw materials. Every compelling brand story rests on four non-negotiable pillars:

• History: The context of your origins. (Like learning how the rock band .38 Special got their name after a police raid at their practice space.)

• Passion: The driving force beyond a paycheck. The real dreams and motivations that keep human beings going, even when it doesn’t look like a standard career path.

• Values: What you actually stand for. (Unlike the Joker in The Dark Knight, who valued chaos, your business needs an active, positive mission. If you claim to value “community,” you have to show up for them, or people see right through it.)

• Skills: The “10,000 hours” of continuous practice — like Ip Man at his wooden dummy, or Steve Vai running guitar scales — that prove you can actually execute when called upon.

With the foundation in place, it’s time for the starting point of your own story: the Signature Story.

The Signature Story — Crafting Your “Signature Story”

(Source: The Elephant in the Room: Story Archetypes and StoryBrand)

Frameworks like Donald Miller’s StoryBrand (adapting Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey) are widely popular — but forcing a real-world business into a rigid fiction archetype is dangerous. It risks over-dramatizing your business, turning facts into fake drama, and confusing your audience.

Pro wrestling veteran Jeff Jarrett says it best: “If you confuse ‘em, you lose ‘em.”

Instead of forcing a 150-page movie script onto a 2-minute web visit, use a Signature Story arc grounded in real life:

• The Normal: The starting status quo.

• The Conflict: The real adversary or “hard times” faced.

• The Climax: The peak moment of tension where you had to dig deep.

• The New Normal: The resolution and transformed state you (and your client) now inhabit.

Note: I adapted this formula from Kindra Hall’s book Stories That Stick, and have since updated it into the SPARC formula. The two are closely aligned.

Once your foundation is set and your first signature story is written, it’s time for the most practical application of all: the About Page.

The About Page — The 7-Step “Secret Weapon” About Page

(Sources: Why Does It Take So Long to Create an About Page? Brand Manifestos & How to Write Your About Page, Optimize and Turn It Into a Secret Weapon for More Business)

Your About Page is usually the second most-visited page on your site. It isn’t a vanity project or a place to list high school achievements — it’s a high-value relationship engine. Building it requires some “soul surgery” to pull out your real “Why,” which is exactly why soulless AI generators can’t do it for you overnight.

The 7-Step Operational Blueprint:

1. Lead with a Clear Value Proposition: Answer immediately at the top — who are you, what do you do, who is it for, and how do you do it? Keep it clear over clever.

2. Tell Your Signature Story: Weave in your 4 Pillars to trigger genuine empathy and emotional engagement.

3. Keep it Customer-Centric: Avoid self-absorbed vanity. Frame your narrative around the reader’s “Day Dream” — how their situation improves once they work with you.

4. Inject Personality: Show your humanity. Skip the “guru” and “expert” labels. Share a quick, fun detail to add human sparkle.

5. Add a Smidgen of Credibility: Use real client logos, testimonials, or awards as subtle proof points — without bragging.

6. Declare Your Brand Manifesto (Values Block): Make a clear proclamation of what you stand for. It attracts your ideal partners and filters out bad fits.

7. End with One Clear Call to Action (CTA): By the bottom of the page, the reader is warm. Give them a clear, logical next step — book a call, get a guide, or check out your primary offer.

Note: Since writing this article, I’ve built the 6Ps Framework to structure the About Page: Plot, Purpose, Promise, Proof, Publicity, and Process.

With a practical application of storytelling in hand, it’s worth seeing how far the same principle stretches — starting with what wrestling can teach us about narrative itself.

The Wrestling Lesson — 5 Pro Wrestling Lessons Applied to Business

(Source: 5 Lessons I Learned About Storytelling From Professional Wrestling)

Professional wrestling is a masterclass in long-term, highly engaged narrative. The mechanics that fill arenas map straight to B2B storytelling:

1. Make Them Feel: Emotion drives action. If the audience doesn’t feel anything, they don’t buy tickets.

2. There is Always a Villain: Every narrative needs an opponent. In business, the villain is the status quo, the crummy existing alternative, or the persistent problem breaking your client’s workflow.

3. Overcome Adversity: Nobody roots for a smooth sail. Watching the protagonist fight through obstacles makes the outcome matter.

4. The Comeback Story: People love a triumph. Highlighting how your team or clients fought through setbacks builds lasting trust.

5. Keep It Simple: Clear plots win. Don’t overcomplicate the story arc — give them a clean line to the payoff.

Storytelling is the ultimate hook for a business, and pro wrestling proves it works at scale. [flag: swap in a verified figure for the $8B claim once you’ve confirmed a source]

The Proof — Storytelling in Action

(Source: How I Sold a Book by Using Storytelling)

When I worked at a retail bookstore that was slowly going under, we were pushed to sell specific titles at the cash register. I picked up David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves, read it, and loved it.

Instead of reading off a list of features, page counts, or publisher accolades to customers at the counter, I just told them a brief story from the book’s introduction — the part where the author’s grandfather tells him, “David. You’re a writer. Make it up.”

That simple story sold multiple copies for me.

When you stop treating storytelling like a decorative polish and start using it as the functional infrastructure of your business, you stop running transactional pitches. You start building relationships.

Wrapping it up

Storytelling is not decoration. You don’t put it in a frame, set it on your desk, and forget about it. It’s the operating system running your internal messaging. And there are more ways to use it than we typically think to look for.

Building that narrative architecture is a high-value task. It builds the message engine that propels you further, and it’s what carries that message to the right audience at the right time.

What is your story? What is your business’s story? What is your customer’s story?

Images by Gemini

Storytelling formulas have been around for a while now. In fact, like me, you may remember as a kid learning the baseline of story formulas in elementary school.

Joseph Campbell mapped the Hero’s Journey. George Lucas ran it through Star Wars. Pixar built their own version and it’s made them over $18 billion. Formulas work — when they fit.

Each story, each formula includes beats — shifts in the story that move it in a different direction.

So, in true Todd fashion, I decided to create my own formula. Not because the others aren’t any good — they are! I remember reading the formula that Kindra Hall included in her wonderful book Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business.

And I realized I needed something I could remember easily. A 12-beat formula might not work that well.

So I worked on the idea for quite some time. I played with different words and built an acronym. I finally found something I was happy with.

It’s important to say stories can have many beats. Different formulas serve you well at different points. Mine isn’t the ultimate one — but it’s one I can use.

And in this time, where people are suddenly realizing storytelling is more than a buzzword in business, more than decoration — it’s infrastructure. It’s sales assets. We realize storytelling is important in business moving forward.

So, with that, let me present to you the SPARC storytelling formula by Copyflight.

Now let me break each one down.

S is for Setting. You might also call it the status quo. This is the point where we start, and nothing’s gone wrong yet. There are no hardships. Life is humming along as it always has.

P is for Problem. Or provocation. This is where things start to get off the rails. Signs appear that things are going to start going wrong. Maybe something’s being foreshadowed. Either way, it’s a moment that — when you look back — you think, “Yeah, I should’ve seen that coming.” Something breaks. The first thing goes wrong, and you ignore the fact that more is coming.

A is for Adversity. At this point, we’re in full-on adversity. Things are going wrong for our protagonist. He or she isn’t catching any breaks. It’s not that one thing goes wrong — it’s that a series of things go wrong. Our protagonist is in crisis mode, trying to flip things back to the way they should be, trying to solve the problem in front of them.

R is for Rally. This is something I think many formulas leave out. There’s a rally from our protagonist — kind of like what you see in a sporting match. Our protagonist has worked hard to gain the upper hand and is starting to find success. It starts with one win, then continues with another. They might lose one here or there, but they’re winning more than losing. They’re starting to feel confident they’ll come out the other side.

Let’s pause for a second. In many stories — in the real world — there’s often tension that repeats between Adversity and Rally. It’s not linear. In some cases, these two beats repeat themselves while sorting through the tension.

C is for Conclusion. We finally arrive. This is when we’ve overcome the adversity, the problem we started experiencing. You might say there’s a new normal, a new status quo. We’re, essentially, back to the Setting — or “factory settings.”

That’s the cycle. It can happen in one scene or across a series of scenes. This is the story formula I chose when creating narratives, especially Founder Stories.

I’m not a big fan of forcing a story to fit a formula, a particular plot, or archetype if it isn’t true. This formula fits most any story that happens. But sometimes “rags to riches” fits. Sometimes the Hero’s Journey works.

Nothing is set in stone. It’s better, I think, to evaluate the story and choose what fits.

Let’s watch it work.

Diane had seventeen tabs open and the look of someone who’d been solving the wrong problem for an hour.

Sam set down his coffee, glanced at the screen, and said nothing. Just waited.

“It’s this tool,” she finally said, gesturing at nothing in particular. “We’ve been paying for it for eight months. Half the team doesn’t use it. I don’t even remember what problem it was supposed to solve.”

“Hm.” Sam scratched his head. “They ever reach out? Check in on you?”

Diane laughed, short and dry. “No. But I’ll tell you what — when my card was about to expire in January?” She turned to look at him. “Four emails in three days.”

Sam was quiet for a moment.

“Four,” she said again.

He nodded slowly, the way he did when something confirmed what he’d already been thinking. “You know what’s interesting about that. They built a perfect system — automated, relentless, personal-sounding — for the moment they needed something from you.” He paused. “And nothing for all the months you needed something from them.”

Diane stared at the tab. “When you say it like that it sounds almost calculated.”

“Might not even be calculated,” Sam said. “Might just be where the attention went. Retention metrics, churn triggers, billing workflows.” He picked up his coffee. “Somebody optimized the heck out of the revenue side. Just forgot there was a person on the other end wondering if any of this was worth it.”

He reached into his bag and set a book on the desk.

“Friend of mine knows her work,” he said. “Brittany Hodak. She wrote this — Creating Superfans.“ He tapped the cover once. “Brittany’s whole thing is that the experience after the sale is where everything is won or lost. Most companies treat it like a footnote. She treats it like the whole story.”

Diane picked it up.

“The card expiration email,” Sam said, “that’s a company talking to a transaction. A Superfan is what happens when you talk to a person instead.” He stood, reached for his jacket. “Turns out people remember the difference.”

He was almost at the door when Diane said, “You think any of our vendors have actually read this?”

Sam smiled without turning around.

“Some have,” he said. “You can always tell which ones.”

One more thing worth saying: this example is proof the formula bends. The Adversity beat here isn’t a pile-up of external disasters — it’s one internal realization, sitting there quietly. SPARC doesn’t need fireworks to work. It just needs the beats to be true.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when posting content on the socialz is what I call “trend hacking.”

Remember the couple that climbed the Empire State Building and got engaged last week? Yeah. They got arrested too. I think they’re thrill seekers.

Either way — it’s wild how many people made images of themselves hanging some flag with a message on it. Everyone participated. (see above, thanks ChatGPT!)

That, my friend, is trend hacking. Nothing wrong with doing it. But doing it all the time is like living on a diet of Fruit Loops. Or cotton candy. Take your pick.

It doesn’t give your audience any nourishment. (Food metaphor, I know.)

It also does something else — it makes you hunt for stuff every single day. What’s the made-up holiday today? National Left Hander’s Day? National Pet Day? International Play a Game Day? (Btw, I’m left handed!)

There are more made-up holidays than Hallmark Christmas movies.

That’s not sustainable. Especially if you’re a one-person show. Eventually you can’t keep up. What do I post today?

The best way to handle your social media is to fold it into your complete content operating system.

I call this your Narrative OS — because you’re running an operating system that distributes your narrative.

That means you start with solid, sustainable long-form content. That’s where the gold is.

But here’s the problem with most long-form content: it reads like another Google research paper. Writer goes to Google, types in the keyword the brief gave them, reads the top five articles, and writes their own version.

That, my friend, is content that gets replicated by — wait for it — AI. AI is gobbling that stuff up in its overviews these days.

It’s called Commodity Content. Google itself used that term earlier this year. Completely devoid of E-E-A-T — Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

That’s exactly what I got into with my friend on the SDM Show — commodity content vs. non-commodity content. The link is below.

All Things SDM

Episode 670 Commodity vs Non Commonity Content With Todd Jones

In this month’s installment of the copywriting segment, host Rob Cairns welcomes regular co-host Todd Jones to discuss a critical shift in the modern content landscape: Commodity Content vs. Non-Commodity Content. The duo breaks down how the rise of AI-generated prose has flooded the internet with recycled information, why traditional SEO metrics are ev…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Rob Cairns

I also created a micro-course to help you understand the difference between commodity and non-commodity content and assess you own content.

The show notes has the PDF guide on the topic.

P.S. What’s the last “made-up holiday” post you made because you were out of ideas? No judgment. I’ve done it too.

One of them is a few weeks old. A wrestling match I built a while back to teach a storytelling framework - SPARC. The other I did earlier this year: a front porch interactive tool you can walk down to dig up five stories you didn’t know you had.

Interactive, free, and fun.

Here it is: generic gets replaced. Specific gets remembered.

In the wrestling game, the villain attacks with corporate fog (”this arena lacks scalable infrastructure”). You win the crowd back with something nobody else could say - the smell of old coffee, the feel of worn wood. Not because it’s clever. Because it’s yours.

In the Front Porch Vault, the five prompts aren’t there to make you sound smarter. They’re there to dig up the memory sitting under the polish - the setback, the belief, the flaw you used to apologize for.

The stuff that can’t be Googled.

And on the podcast today, I found myself pointing to something Google’s own people are now saying out loud: AI can synthesize your “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” in about four seconds flat. What it can’t synthesize is why you personally waived the inspection and saved a client $15,000 - because that’s not information. That’s a memory. It’s specificity Google literally can’t replicate, which is exactly why it’s starting to reward it.

(Same fight. Different ring. One of these fights I’ve apparently been having for years without realizing it.)

I’ve been saying it a different way for a while now - you have a story that sells, you just can’t see it yet - turns out even the algorithm agrees with me.

So here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it, three ways:

1. Fight the vague.

The wrestling game walks you through the SPARC formula live - pick your counter-move, watch the crowd meter decide if you won the room. Interactive Match

2. Find what’s already yours.
The Front Porch Vault runs you through five prompts and hands you back stories you’re already sitting on - plug-and-play, ready to post. → https://www.copyflight.com/front-porch/

3. See why this matters more than ever.
The full breakdown on commodity vs. non-commodity content - why AI is starting to punish generic and reward lived experience, straight from what I unpacked on the podcast today. → Commodity vs Non-Commodity Content Cheat sheet

Same fight in every ring. Get specific, or get summarized.

What’s the one story from your work that couldn’t be Googled if someone tried?

— Todd

PS: More free tools and games are here.

Never heard her music.

Thing is, my dial is set on Classic Country — not today’s country. Mark Chesnutt, Garth, Reba, Brooks & Dunn. Legends.

But here’s this girl who got hot just like Lainey Wilson. Didn’t really think anyone else would come along and do that.

I was wrong.

Last night I was watching a little bit of the CMA Fest. Watched a couple of acts, then tuned out. I noticed Ella Langley would be performing later. Didn’t stick around.

Later that night, scrolling the Instagram feed when I should have been asleep, and there she was.

Singing this song that sort of just moved you in a slow swaying kind of way. She had the entire audience — men, women, and children — in the palm of her hand. Every single word. While I struggled to figure out what she was even singing.

She came out of nowhere. And suddenly here I am trying to figure out what she’s saying in “Choosing Texas.”

She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way
He’s two-stepping ‘round the room
And judging by the smile that’s written on his face
There’s nothing I can do
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinking Jack all by myself
He’s choosing Texas, I can tell

The performance at CMA Fest that I ran into on Instagram.

Something about that song — how she sang it, the crowd, the music — just captured my attention.

I wanted to know more about her.

I knew everyone loved her, but I didn’t know anything. She skyrocketed onto the scene. With Lainey, at least I saw her on Yellowstone. Langley? Nothing.

She’s got the girl-next-door look because, well, she is. Grew up in Alabama. Sang in church. Inherited her grandfather’s guitar when he passed.

So did I.

There’s a “one of us” quality she has that makes her so endearing. Oh, and the bangs. Those bangs are as signature as bell bottoms were for Lainey.

Yet she looks magical on stage.

She looks like the kind of girl who would be friends with your girlfriend, your sister, your cousin. The girl you went to church with. Whose first job was at the trampoline park.

And like so many in the business, she has this ability to make everyone feel seen.

The crowd at the CMA Fest sang every word like they knew her personally.

During the World Cup in America, some fans discovered her — went to one of her concerts while in Texas. She took a picture with them. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s something to watch someone skyrocket that fast. The flip side is all the pressure that comes with it. She seems grounded in her family and faith, so hopefully that helps her endure.

Anyway. Not sure if she’s really choosing Texas or if Alabama still has her heart.

But clearly, hundreds of millions of fans have chosen her.

There’s something about people like Langley, when combined with the power of music — which is storytelling — that resonates with so many people.

Yes. That’s the lesson. Storytelling. It is the commentary of the human condition.

Those narratives are powerful.

I gave up my musical thoughts years ago. Left it to the professionals. I learned a few chords on the guitar I got from my grandpa. My rhythm wasn’t great. But I loved the lyric-writing part.

I’ve been circling the idea of picking that back up. Maybe pulling out that old guitar to see if it still makes a sound.

Recently I started dabbling in it again because of Suno — the AI tool that helps non-musical people like me actually make songs. Using something like ChatGPT, I was able to bring a song idea to fruition. Still revising it.

At the least, it’s a creative outlet. Another way to tell a story. Or retell the ones that were passed down long before me.

Do you have a creative outlet?

One of my songs

Runaway Rails (Southern Rock)

You all already know about Simple Sam and Osweiler Steed. I’m also in the process of building the Southern Grit Wrestling Organization, just a few of what will be called Jonesworld. I even have a song for that.

Have a great week everyone!

What does it take to endure something painful to get relief? What does it take to knowingly do the thing that causes the pain to get relief?

I think I ask that question every night.

Let me explain.

Back in 1997-98, I had a series of trips to the urologist when I lived in Fort Worth, TX.

I can’t remember the dates, the months, or anything like that. It’s kind of a blur.

The urologist was a guy named Dr. Lamensdorf. Short, pudgy, German guy. He was a nice man, and he cared about me. But what he did to help me was excruciating.

And it’s something, to some degree, I still do today, myself.

I’ve written this in my head a hundred times. But I’m navigating myself through it right now.

You see, I have a condition called severe urethral stricture disorder. I have strictures — restricted pathways — in my urethra and through my urinary tract. It caused a lot of pain and straining when I went to the bathroom, and it caused me to have infections.

This time period I’m telling you about is about the middle of the story. Well, maybe the front side of the middle. It all started when I was 15 years old. That’s another story I will tell you on another day.

Back to our time frame, 97-98.

I went to see Dr. Lamensdorf and his prescription was to dilate my urethra, in the office.

(Think metal rods, graduated in size, clinical and cold — nothing like what you’d expect a doctor to use on one of the most sensitive parts of your body.)

He would put them in to “stretch” the urethra. He would use more than one at a time, which tells me — looking back — that he was using them at different sizes.

Of course it was painful. Extremely painful, and would leave blood.

That was what they did during that time period. At least for me.

One time another used an old school scope to view inside — looked more like a telescope than the nice rubber ones they have today.

Dr. Lamensdorf would use those to open up my urinary tract so that I could use the bathroom better and avoid having infections all the time.

Working on that part of your anatomy is extremely stressful. It’s one of the most sensitive areas physically, and it is also the most sensitive areas mentally and emotionally.

So each time, when the visit was through, my stress was through the roof.

Lucky for me there was a Braum’s Ice Cream across the street. I would visit that Braum’s to drown the emotion and anxiety of the trip.

It made me feel good, likely for a few minutes. I can’t say it did too much for my health. I don’t know.

But for me, at that time, it felt like a necessary part of the ritual.

Now, back to today.

I use a catheter almost every night to keep the urethra open. It’s painful most of the time, but not as painful as on those days at the doctor’s office. Oh, and its not as intimidating as those metal dilators!

I only execute once, and more times than not, there is no blood.

Sometimes if the inflammation is low, it isn’t that bad at all. Hard to believe, I know.

It is a necessary part of my life now. And I don’t get ice cream each time I do that. Although I might make myself some tea. Or take some Ibuprofen.

Is the pain of the process worth the relief on the other side? Yes.

Does that make it any easier? No.

There are many chapters to this story, this narrative. I told myself I would tell it one day. Starting is the hardest part.

In the past I’ve told it, but more of a big picture and vague. I know now that I have to tell smaller sections — not gloss over scenes like being on the table in the urologist’s office.

There are procedures, surgeries, that go along with it. I could probably do a chapter on each one.

Sometimes I talk about my health issues, but I tend to focus more on my diabetes or my sleep apnea, or the effects of my neck surgery. But the one thing in the middle that never goes away is my struggle with severe urethral stricture disease.

It is the constant. The one thing I wanted to go away more than anything else, and all that’s happened is I have learned how to manage it.

I don’t know. Maybe I answered this question for myself:

What does it take to endure something painful to get relief? What does it take to knowingly do the thing that causes the pain to get relief?

The rain had stopped by noon, but the humidity stayed behind, thick as wool and smelling of wet gravel.

Osweiler sat at the desk in the corner nook and looked at the flyer.

It was printed on white copy paper, the kind that costs eight dollars for five hundred sheets. The ink had bled a little at the edges where the humidity had gotten to it. Clara Gable’s name was at the bottom in twelve-point Times New Roman, which was the font of someone who had learned to type on a machine that didn’t offer a choice.

The Miller Mountain Community Library gently requests donations for our Annual Summer & Winter Youth Literacy Drive...

He knew Clara Gable’s story the way you know anyone’s story up here — not because they told you, but because the mountain didn’t know how to keep a secret even when it tried. She’d gone off to Fayetteville, then further north, chasing degrees in English and Literature, writing lines that probably didn’t rhyme but carried the weight of the dirt she’d been raised on.

Then her father’s heart started missing beats. Her mother’s mind started wandering into the woods behind the creek and not always coming back. Clara came home. The town didn’t have money for a librarian but they had a drafty room behind the courthouse and a stack of paperbacks that smelled like basement mold. They’d begged. She’d stayed.

Jimmie shifted by the hearth. The fire had gone low.

Osweiler flipped the flyer over.

He didn’t reach for the keyboard. He took the carpenter’s pencil from the bib pocket of his overalls and held it for a moment, the way a man holds a thing before he decides what to do with it. Then he started to write. Block letters, thick lead, the kind of hand that leaves a mark even through the page.

He wrote for eleven minutes.

He looked at what he’d written.

He got up, put a log on the fire, and came back and read it again.

Then he went to the supply shelf and found the yellow cardstock — a stock he’d ordered in bulk for a direct-mail campaign five years ago, one that had cleared six figures and that he’d never mentioned to anyone in this county. He cut twenty sheets on the edge of the desk.

He printed nothing. He wrote every one by hand.

NO BOOKS FOR THE BLIZZARD.

Last winter, twenty-six children in this county had nothing to read but the back of soup cans.

When the snow comes, the roads close. The screens go dark. A book isn’t a luxury when the roads close. It’s the only thing in the house that goes somewhere.

Our library is out of stories. The shelves for the kids are bare.

Ms. Gable gave up the city to come back here. She’s been keeping the shelves stocked on her own ever since. She can’t do it alone anymore.

Five dollars buys a paperback. Twenty dollars keeps a kid in the world all January.

There is a jar on the desk. Use it.

The library sat in the shadow of the old limestone courthouse, tucked into a room that had once stored land deeds from the late 1800s. The floor sloped slightly toward the east wall. Three rows of metal shelving made the space feel like a maze it had no right to be, given its size.

Clara Gable didn’t look up when the door groaned against the floorboards.

“We close at four, Todd.” she said.

“I ain’t Todd,” Osweiler said.

She looked up then. Her eyes moved across him the way eyes do when they’re recalibrating — the hat, the overalls, the size of him filling the doorframe. In his right hand, a stack of yellow paper, folded once.

“Mr. Steed.” She set down her pen. “I didn’t recognize the boots.”

He crossed the room without hurry and laid the stack on the oak counter beside a glass jar. Three dollar bills. Two quarters. The jar had a piece of masking tape on it that said LIBRARY FUND in blue marker, the letters slightly uneven, like she’d written it standing up.

Clara pulled the top sheet from the stack.

She read it.

She read it again.

Her thumb moved to the line about the soup cans and stopped there. Outside, a truck downshifted on the county road. The dust motes turned in the light from the high windows.

“This isn’t grant language,” she said finally. Her voice had dropped into a register she probably didn’t know she had. “It’s a bit stark.”

“Stark gets read,” Osweiler said. “Polite gets filed.”

She looked up from the paper. She looked at him the way Clara Gable looked at things she was trying to solve — steady, a little impatient, like the answer was there and she resented it for not arriving faster.

“Who wrote this.”

It wasn’t quite a question.

“Found it on the back of a grocery sack,” Osweiler said. His mouth moved, almost. “Thought it had some legs.”

Clara looked back at the yellow paper. She didn’t say anything else. She walked to the window and taped the first one up herself, pressing the corners flat with her thumb, stepping back to check the angle.

Osweiler set the rest of the stack on the counter and left.

By Friday the glass jar was gone.

In its place sat a five-gallon water jug with a slot cut into the plastic lid. It was better than half-full — tens and twenties mostly, one crumpled fifty that Darnell himself had put in, who’d told three people at the register that he hadn’t realized the Miller kids were down to reading Campbell’s labels.

Osweiler came in at three o’clock. He didn’t have any paper this time.

Clara was at the back corner, sorting through a cardboard box that smelled of fresh ink and glue. New books. Bright covers.

“They came this morning,” she said, without turning around. “Memphis distributor. I told them we had cash on hand.”

Osweiler stopped at the end of the steel shelf. His shadow crossed the floor between them.

“I know it was you,” Clara said. She set down a copy of Bridge to Terabithia and turned to face him. Her arms crossed over her cardigan. “The structure. No one on this mountain writes with that kind of economy. Not even the lawyers.”

Osweiler looked at the pine floor. His boot found a knot in the grain and stayed there.

The room was quiet the way old rooms get quiet — not empty, just patient.

“My uncle had a place up the road,” he said. “Where mine is now, near enough.”

Clara waited.

“Winters up here freeze the clock.” He paused. “Everything just — stops.”

He reached out and picked up the copy of Bridge to Terabithia from the top of the stack. Turned it over. Put it back.

“My dad had a crate of Hardy Boys he’d found at an auction in Fort Smith. Blue covers. Spine-split on most of them.” He looked up. “I must’ve read The Tower Treasure six times one winter. Kept me from losing my mind at the walls.”

Clara didn’t nod. She didn’t fill the silence with anything.

After a moment she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and placed a small green cloth-bound volume on top of the new books.

“That one’s not for the library,” she said.

Osweiler picked it up. His hand — the size of it, the calluses — made the book look like something found rather than made. He slipped it into the front pocket of his overalls.

“Much obliged,” he said.

He was crossing the courthouse square when he passed Darnell on the bench. The old man had a cold pipe between his teeth and his eyes on nothing in particular, which was how Darnell looked when he was paying the most attention.

He watched Osweiler’s heavy stride. Watched the corner of green cloth sticking out of the man’s front pocket — that particular shade Clara Gable used, the one she kept for her own work, not the library’s.

Darnell didn’t say anything.

He looked from the man to the yellow flyer taped in the window across the street, still bright against the glass, legible from forty feet in the afternoon light.

He put the pipe back between his teeth.

There’s more than one kind of timber growing up on that mountain, he thought. And some of it’s too straight for this valley.

All images made with Gemini’s Nano Banana

I had it wrong for a long time.

I assumed founders struggled to write. Bad with words. Couldn’t string a sentence together. So I kept building systems around that problem.

Then I started paying closer attention.

Most founders can write just fine. What they can’t find is something worth writing about. They open a blank document, stare at it, and realize they’ve got nothing — not because they’re not smart enough, but because they’re too close to their own story to see it.

That’s not a writing problem.

It’s a story problem. And it needs a different tool.

Your best brand assets are the messy, human, real-world moments you’ve already lived through. You don’t need to invent anything. You just need a shovel.

I built one. It’s called The Front Porch Story Vault.

Originally I created it to make folks aware of my book, but it turned out to be a nice little tool!

How It Works

5 prompts. 5 stories already living inside your work and life — just waiting to be found.

It’s completely free, it’s short, and it doesn’t ask you for a marketing strategy. Just five simple questions designed to surface the raw stories you’ve been sitting on without knowing it.

Answer them, and the system hands you five plug-and-play templates built from your specific answers.

Here’s what comes out of the vault:

The “Back on Track” Paradox — Why your failures are actually the most valuable chapters of your brand story.

The Coffee Filter Test — How to tell if your business values actually mean something, or if they’re just expensive wallpaper.

Memorable vs. Perfect — Why your “flaws” are the secret weapon that makes customers choose you over the competition.

The Oxytocin Engine — The science-backed reason a well-told story changes the chemistry of a room (and a sale).

The Arkansas Secret — What 50+ years of rural wisdom can teach you about building a global community.

Easy way to create 5 pieces of content if you are struggling to know what to write about. Free. No stings. Just let me know how it goes.

If you’re tired of chasing algorithms, you already own what you need.

No corporate jargon. No manufactured content. Just real substance — dug up, shaped, and ready to publish.

The vault is open.

→ Take the 5-Prompt Challenge & Open Your Vault

And, if you want to check out my book, you can do that here.

It is way too easy to depend on ChatGPT and other LLMs to create content. Saw a poll today in a Facebook Group for agencies. Most of the people said they use it for content.

It figures.

Content creation isn’t everyone’s strong suit and often small and solo business owners are among them.

You can create something quickly that is way better than anything you can write yourself.

Or is it?

The result is that everyone is tired of AI Slop. You have heard the term. You know what it is. Content that sounds like everyone else.

So... you need an advantage. Something that sounds like YOU and not everything else.

That’s what I’ve been building.

It lives inside Claude as a project.

I anticipated this being used more with solos or very, very small teams. That’s who I built it for. Because what I saw when I looked at what else was out there — the team-oriented platforms, the brief-heavy workflows — none of that fits the way solos actually work.

Sometimes they have briefs. Usually they don’t. What they have is themselves, a topic, and whatever time they can carve out.

So I built something different.

I’ve got my tone of voice in there. A file called Brand DNA — built from a prompt that pulls from my own stuff so it knows how I speak. I like to use story examples. I quote from culture. All of that is in there, with examples.

Then the frameworks. Every format I use. Authority structure for LinkedIn. A GEO-optimized article structure for blog posts. Facebook, Google Business Profile, the WebCopy System — which is mine, I created it. About page roadmap. Core messaging. What to avoid.

The memory keeps being updated every time there’s something new.

This saves me from loading prompts every time.

Here’s the thing I decided early that I think matters most:

I don’t want it to finish, push and publish without my eyes looking at it and going — this is good, this is not.

I’ve decided not to be overly automated with it because I don’t always like what it outputs and I need to view it, I need to adjust it. The email that came out this morning — I already had it in the platform but I made adjustments on the fly.

The automation isn’t the point. The system is the point.

It’s an imperfect system. It’s not complete.

I’ve got other prompts I think we can pull together one day. But what it does right now is let me show up with the raw piece — the idea, the story, whatever I’m working on — and just mold it.

The foundation is there. The voice is in there. The formats are in there.

I just have to bring the material.

The best thing to do is make sure people get proper input to get better output — and really lean in on what their tone of voice is.

So that they do sound more authentic.

Not like some robot did it.

That’s the whole game. The system is just the container. Your voice is what goes in it.

Everyone is creating content. Not everyone sounds like themselves. That’s the advantage.

The Brand DNA Excavator is where this starts — for me and for anyone I help build this out.

It’s what puts your voice in the system so the system actually sounds like you.

→ Learn more about the system here.

P.S. Are you running any kind of content system right now — or still relying on generic prompts and hoping for the best? Curious where people are with this.

All images created with Gemini’s Nano Banana.

If something here hits close to home, sit with it. That’s where the work begins.

Claire Hutchins had been in digital marketing long enough to remember when Google was just a verb people used apologetically, like they weren’t sure it would stick.

Fifteen years. Three offices. A wall of case studies that actually meant something. She’d built campaigns that moved product, generated leads, turned invisible companies into names people recognized. She knew this business.

Which is why the last eighteen months felt like trying to drive with the parking brake on.

She was mid-audit when Sam showed up — one of those ambient introductions where a mutual contact had apparently said you two should talk and neither of them had quite agreed to it. He knocked on the open door, took in the room the way he always did, unhurried, like he was reading something written on the walls.

“You the one doing the audit?” he said.

“Client audit,” Claire said, without looking up. “Quarterly review. I do twelve of these a year.”

“Mind if I watch?”

She gestured at the chair across from her. Sam sat, set his thermos on the edge of the desk — the A-Team one, Hannibal’s face slightly faded from years of use — and didn’t say anything.

Claire pulled up the first client. A regional HVAC company. Solid PPC spend, decent click volume, cost-per-lead creeping up for the third quarter running. She made a note. Moved to the next. A med spa. Same pattern — clicks holding, but conversions softening. The ad spend was doing what ad spend does. It was everything around it that wasn’t cooperating.

Sam watched her work through three more clients before he said anything.

“These numbers — they used to look different?”

Claire set down her pen. “Two years ago, same spend would generate thirty percent more qualified leads. Across almost every account.”

“Hm.” Sam scratched his head. “What changed?”

“That’s what everyone wants to know.” She said it with just enough edge to mean including me. “Competition got more expensive. Platforms got greedier. AI changed how people search.” She picked the pen back up. “We adjusted targeting. Tightened copy. Tested new landing pages. The fundamentals are sound.”

“Sure, sure,” Sam said. He was quiet for a moment. “You mind pulling up your own site?”

Claire looked at him. “My site.”

“Just curious.”

She turned to the second monitor and pulled it up. The homepage loaded — clean design, professional photography, a headline that said Performance Marketing That Delivers Results.

Sam leaned forward slightly, reading. He didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“What do you do?” he asked.

“It’s right there. Performance marketing.”

“Right, right. And what makes you different from the other performance marketing agencies?”

Claire opened her mouth. Closed it. Pulled up the about page. Fifteen years of experience. Data-driven approach. Dedicated account teams. Proven results across industries.

Sam nodded slowly. The way he did when he wasn’t agreeing, just receiving.

“I’m just wondering,” he said. “If someone who’d never heard of you landed on this page — what would they remember?”

The room was quiet except for the hum of the HVAC unit.

Claire looked at the page like she was seeing it for the first time, which in a sense she was. She’d written it five years ago. Updated the photos two years ago. The words had just... stayed.

“You want some coffee?” Sam said.

The Bookshop That Doesn’t Run Ads

They drove twelve minutes to a place called Footnote — a used and independent bookshop wedged between a dry cleaner and an insurance office in a strip mall that had seen better decades. The sign was handpainted. The parking lot had three cars in it and a fourth pulling in as they arrived.

“You know the owner?” Claire asked.

“Little bit,” Sam said.

Inside, a woman in her sixties with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead was doing three things at once — helping a customer, recommending something to someone on the phone, and apparently cataloging a new box of arrivals with her free hand. She looked up, pointed at Sam like she’d been expecting him, and held up one finger.

Three minutes later she was shaking Claire’s hand. Her name was Vera.

“Sam tells me you do marketing,” Vera said.

“Digital, mostly. Paid search, performance campaigns.”

Vera nodded like this was a foreign language she’d heard before but never studied. “We don’t do any of that. I keep meaning to figure out Google Ads. Never quite get to it.”

“How do people find you?” Claire asked. She couldn’t help it. Occupational reflex.

“Word of mouth, mostly. Some of them find us because they’re looking for something specific — a genre, an author — and apparently we come up. I don’t entirely understand that part.” Vera gestured around the store. “But mostly people come because someone told them to come. And then they tell someone else.”

“What do they tell them?”

Vera thought about it. “That we know books. That if you tell us what you liked, we’ll find you three more things you didn’t know you were looking for.” She smiled. “I’ve been doing this long enough that I know what kind of reader walks through the door before they open their mouth.”

Claire looked around the shop. A hand-lettered card on one shelf said If you liked Demon Copperhead, start here. Another said Books for people who think they don’t like poetry. Each one specific. Each one written like it knew who was reading it.

“Do you have an about page?” Claire asked.

“On the website? Probably. My nephew set it up.” Vera waved vaguely. “I wrote a paragraph about why I started the shop. The real reason, not the business reason. My mother had Alzheimer’s. Books were the last thing that reached her. I started collecting the ones that did, and then I couldn’t stop.” She paused. “People always seem to find that part.”

In the car afterward, Claire was quiet.

“She’s not running ads,” she finally said.

“Nope.”

“She doesn’t have a strategy.”

“Not one she could write down.”

“But people find her.”

“Yep.” Sam poured coffee from the thermos into the cap, which he used as a cup. “I’m just wondering — what does she have that your about page doesn’t?”

Claire stared out the windshield. “A reason.”

Sam didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

What the Algorithm Already Knows

Back at Claire’s office, she pulled up the audit again. But something had shifted in how she was looking at it.

“The PPC isn’t broken,” she said slowly. “It’s just doing what it’s always done. Renting attention. And renting costs more every year.”

“Mm.”

“But the clients who are holding steadiest—” she scrolled through the data — “look at this. This law firm. This physical therapy group. Their cost-per-lead is up too, but their close rates are better. Their leads are more qualified.” She leaned back. “They both have really specific stories. The law firm only does construction defect cases. The PT clinic was started by a guy who rehabbed from a spinal injury. Their whole site is built around that.”

“Hm,” Sam said.

“The algorithm is sending better people to them because it knows who they are.” She paused. “It knows who they are because they know who they are.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it.”

Claire pulled up her own about page again. Fifteen years of experience. Data-driven approach. Dedicated account teams.

She read it out loud, slowly. Like reading someone else’s words.

“There’s nothing wrong with any of this,” she said.

“Nope.”

“It just doesn’t tell you anything.”

“Doesn’t tell you who you are, who you’re for, why any of it matters.” Sam picked up the thermos. “I read something a while back — research out of a firm called Wynter. B2B buyers, they said, don’t go looking with a blank slate. They show up with a shortlist already built. Three, four names they already know and trust. The algorithm just helps them pick.”

“So if you’re not already in someone’s head—”

“You’re not in the conversation. Doesn’t matter how good your ads are.”

Claire sat with that. Outside her window, the afternoon had gone grey and still.

“I’ve been telling clients to build brand story for three years,” she said. “I put it in every proposal. Paid search works best when it’s reinforcing something people already believe about you. I say that.”

“Sure.”

“And my own about page says data-driven approach.“

Sam smiled, just barely. The kind of smile that’s more acknowledgment than amusement.

“Cobbler’s shoes,” he said.

“Yeah.” Claire closed the browser tab. Opened a new document. Sat there for a moment looking at the blank page. “I started this agency because I watched my dad’s hardware store get swallowed by a big box chain. Not because they were better. Because people didn’t know what they were losing until it was gone. I wanted to help businesses like his — the ones with something real to offer — actually be findable.” She stopped. “I’ve never put that anywhere.”

“Might be worth putting somewhere.”

“The algorithm would know what to do with that.”

“So would a person,” Sam said.

He stood, reached for his jacket.

“You know what Jay Acunzo says,” he said, not quite as a question. “’Don’t be the best. Be their favorite.’ Best is something you prove. Favorite is something you earn.” He tucked the thermos under his arm. “Right now your page is trying to prove something. Vera’s page is earning something.”

At the door he turned back.

“That client audit you were running — the ones holding steady, the law firm and the PT clinic — might be worth understanding why before you try to fix anything else. I have a feeling you already know the answer. Just haven’t written it down yet.”

After he left, Claire looked at the blank document for a long time.

Then she typed: Why I started this.

And kept going.

Three Months Later

Claire didn’t overhaul everything at once.

She rewrote the about page first. The real story — her dad’s hardware store, the big box chain, the thing she’d been trying to fix ever since. It took her four drafts and longer than she wanted to admit. The fifth draft she sent to a friend who’d never worked in marketing and asked: Do you know what we do now and why it matters?

The friend said yes.

She started putting the same question to clients. Not what are your keywords but what would someone lose if you disappeared? Some of them struggled. The ones who didn’t — the ones who answered without hesitating — those were the ones she started building from.

The PPC spend didn’t go away. It still works. It just works differently now — reinforcing something that already exists instead of shouting into a void.

Last week a prospect emailed to say she’d found Claire’s agency after an AI search returned three options. She’d looked at all three about pages.

“Yours was the only one,” she wrote, “that felt like it was written by a person.”

Claire forwarded it to her team without comment.

Some things you don’t need to explain.

Find the DNA inside your brand.

→ Brand DNA — Copyflight

Friday nights in the late 1970s always started inside the cavernous, vinyl-scented interior of a heavy brown station wagon we called Big Mama.

If you sat in the back seat, you’d hear the distinct, heavy clunk of a massive audio amplifier shifting around on the floorboard. My dad was the public address announcer at the local dirt track. Because the track didn’t have a secure building to lock up electronics during the week, that entire power pack had to live at our house, riding shotgun with us into town every single Friday.

Before we ever hit the dirt, Big Mama always made a mandatory pit stop at the Minute Maid Burger Place—a local Arkansas chain from back in the day. To be completely honest, I couldn’t tell you if the burgers were actually any good. The culinary details have faded. But the memory of that greasy paper bag sitting on the dashboard, the smell of the fries, and the thick anticipation of what came next? That’s locked in forever.

Heading out of town toward the grandstands, the real magic happened when the trailers started appearing on the two-lane highway. You’d press your face against the glass of the station wagon and see them rolling in: local legends like Larry Carson in the No. 25 ‘White Lightning’ car, Vance Cook in ‘Hawkeye,’ or a hot-shot kid named Mark Martin tearing it up in an orange and white mid-70s Camaro.

The closer we got to the track, the more the hum of high-octane engines and the smell of flying dirt filled the air. Even today, watching dirt track racing online in 2026, a single glance at those old cars takes me right back to that euphoric high.

The power of nostalgia

That feeling isn’t just sentimentality. It points to something primal wired into the human brain.

I’ve often said that the final, absolute principle of persuasion is nostalgia. In a digital world that moves at a breakneck pace—where everything feels polished, optimized, and slightly sterile—looking back draws up a deep emotional resonance that people forgot they even possessed.

Nostalgia is a time machine. It takes us back to things that may not have been objectively perfect or the greatest in the world, but they were real. They had texture. They had grit.

When you are trying to communicate a message, build a brand, or connect with an audience, you aren’t just fighting for attention; you are fighting for connection. Most modern marketing fails because it sounds like a corporate robot wrote it in a sterile boardroom. It lacks a porch.

But when you inject real, unpolished nostalgia into your communication, you don’t have to use high-pressure sales tactics or hype. You’ve instantly earned the right to be heard because you’re honoring a shared human experience. You’re reminding them of who they are.

Front Porch Conversations

The world needs a lot more front-porch conversations and a lot fewer automated funnels right now.

That’s exactly why I put together my book, Musings from an Arkansas Storyteller. It’s a collection of these exact kinds of local roots, community moments, and everyday observations—including an entire section dedicated to pancakes, Evil Knievel, and the art of stacking your wins.

It’s an easy, 30-minute read meant for pulling up a chair and slowing down for a second. If you’re looking for a quick escape from the noise, or if you’re looking for a meaningful, plainspoken gift for the father in your life this week, I’d love for you to grab a copy.

You can find Musings from an Arkansas Storyteller right here on Amazon.

PS: Review from Patrick:

This book is short and simple in its presentation. I probably read the whole thing in about twenty minutes or so. At first, I was wondering what the purpose of the book was. But soon I found, with every simple little story, I was left thinking about something. Whether it was about how I run my business, conduct myself in my life, or how I handle my relationships - i found myself thinking about how I could approach it in a better way. Very happy to have read it, and I suspect I’ll be revisiting it from time to time.

There’s a certain kind of dread that comes with a really good long-form article.

You know the type. Detailed. Thorough. The kind of thing you bookmark and tell yourself you’ll read later. Ross Simmonds dropped one a while back — a gigantic, detailed, thorough post about using Reddit for marketing.

It was exactly the kind of thing I needed to read.

And I didn’t have 20 minutes to digest it right then.

Here's what happened when I finally got desperate enough to try something dumb.

So I did something kind of on the spur of the moment.

Went to Gemini, dropped the link in, and said — hey, explain to me what he’s talking about, kind of break it down.

And it did. But I noticed it was a little bit technical. Still a little bit harder to understand. Still felt like homework.

I hadn’t solved the problem. I’d just moved it.

So I pushed it a little further — and this is the part that changed things.

I typed something I didn't expect to work.

“Hey, teach it to me like I’m in 8th grade. Turn it into a course.”

Something clicked. Because I knew in doing that it would give these sweeping, overarching topics and then distill the information in more detail underneath. And it worked. It was amazing.

I shared it with Ross not long after. He called it “Gold!” — which, coming from him, I’ll take. That was over a year ago.

Still works.

But here's the part nobody talks about — the grade level actually matters.

Now here’s why 8th grade specifically.

If you go too low — like 5th grade — you’re probably going to be a little bored. The information gets too stripped down. If you go too high it might still be a little bit harder to understand, especially if the topic is already dense.

8th grade hits the sweet spot. Simplified enough to move fast. Detailed enough to actually learn something.

So here’s what I’ve discovered over the last few months.

Almost all of the major LLMs have a built-in module to learn something now. Most people walk right past it.

In Claude it’s sitting right at the bottom of the chat box — alongside Write, Code, Life Stuff. Click Learn. It gives you some prompt stuff you can fill in and use right away.

ChatGPT has it too. You may have to just prompt it directly — something like hey, teach this to me like I’m in 8th grade, turn it into a very micro course based on this information. Works the same way.

Gemini is excellent for this, particularly through NotebookLM — that’s Google’s product where you can actually build quizzes, generate audio, even video to help you learn the material. I’ve actually done that for some of my own products on Gumroad.

Perplexity has a learn step-by-step module with interactive learning quizzes. You click it, upload your document, and it builds it out for you.

And if you use Qwen — some of you may not, may not be interested — it has a learn module as well. I’ve been using it because I have a free account off the open source model.

Five different tools. Same basic move.

And that’s not even the best use of it.

You know that folder in your Google Drive — the one with probably 50 or more PDFs you downloaded to get on somebody’s list and then immediately unsubscribed from? Those aren’t dead weight. You can literally feed one to an AI, tell it to walk you through the information step by step, and watch it build out a micro-lesson right there.

Dense article you’ve been avoiding? Same move.

Data-heavy charts? Especially that one. Honestly, charts and I have a complicated relationship. I struggle with deep data charts and stuff like that. Numbers start swimming, my brain taps out. The 8th grade framing cuts right through it.

Here's where it gets interesting for your business.

If you have one thing you teach over and over, you could probably take that and have AI create some sort of micro course out of it. Nothing fancy. Maybe even an interactive guide to go with it. Could be a solid lead magnet to get people on your list.

Because sometimes reading isn’t enough. Sometimes we need visuals. Sometimes we just need the language simplified. Sometimes we need to learn in the format we actually relate to best.

I'm actually about to test it on something right now.

Rand Fishkin just dropped a new article over at SparkToro. That’s exactly the kind of piece I’d normally stare at, respect deeply, and understand about 60% of. I’m going to use this process to dig into it.

Maybe you’ve got something like that sitting in a tab right now.

Give it a try. Pick one thing — a long article, a PDF collecting dust, a topic you keep meaning to dig into — and ask your LLM to teach it to you like you’re in 8th grade.

See what happens.

And if you want some tools to help you think and create faster, I just updated my freebies page. Worth poking around.

→ Copyflight Freebies

The rain had been hitting the window for three hours.

Marmalade — that’s the cat — hadn’t moved from the edge of the desk since noon. Just sitting there under the lamp, one eye open, watching me like she was waiting for something interesting to happen. I’d poured my second cup. Nothing interesting had happened.

Then the door opened.

She walked in clutching a folder the way people clutch things when they already know what’s inside is bad. Consultant type. Sharp. The kind of person who figures things out fast and hates that she hadn’t figured this one out yet.

“They said it would take five minutes,” she said. “Just describe what you do. Hit generate. Done.”

I pointed at the chair.

She sat. Set the folder on the desk. Didn’t open it. Didn’t need to.

“The leads dried up,” she said. “I’ve been publishing for four months and nothing sticks. My web guy says the copy is clean. My designer says it looks great. And I’m sitting here wondering why no one’s calling.”

I opened the folder.

The headline read: In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, we leverage synergistic solutions to empower your breakthrough journey.

Marmalade looked at it. Looked away. Went back to sleep.

I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize the smell. Not bad writing exactly. Worse than that. Writing that had never been anywhere near a real person. The kind of copy that gets generated when someone types “write a homepage for a coach” into a box and hits enter — no context, no story, no reason to believe any of it. Technically fluent. Completely hollow.

“You didn’t give it anything to work with,” I said.

She looked up. Then back at the folder. Then at me.

“I gave it plenty,” she said. “Three paragraphs about my process. My credentials. My client results. I gave it everything I had.”

“You gave it facts,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”

She didn’t like that. Good. The ones who don’t like it are the ones who actually listen.

“The machine isn’t broken,” I said. “It’s just been handed an empty briefcase and asked to make a delivery.” I pushed the folder back across the desk. “It gave you an echo. Because underneath all those facts, you gave it silence.”

I turned to the filing cabinet. Third drawer. The one that doesn’t open easy.

Inside was a folder labeled Brand Masterfile. Not a template. Not a checklist. A system for pulling out what actually happened — the origin, the moment things changed, the client who called at 11pm because something finally clicked. The stories that feel too ordinary to mention and turn out to be the only thing people remember.

I set it on the desk between us.

She looked at it. Looked at me. “This is more work than five minutes.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the point.”

Something shifted in her face. The resistance didn’t leave exactly — but it moved over and made room for something else.

“The machine can write,” I said. “That was never the question. The question is what you feed it. You give it your actual story — the specific moment, the real stakes, the thing you know because you lived it — and it stops producing echoes. It starts producing you.“

She picked up the folder.

The rain was still going. Marmalade had shifted into a full curl, one paw over her nose, completely indifferent to the ongoing crisis in B2B content marketing.

I refilled the coffee.

Some cases are complicated. This one wasn’t. The copy was lifeless because nothing alive had gone into it. Feed the machine silence, it gives you silence back — just dressed up in business casual and wearing a confident smile.

The founder tucked the folder under her arm. Same motion as when she’d walked in, clutching the bad copy. But different. Less like evidence. More like a plan.

“Come back when you’ve worked through it,” I said. “Then we build the copy right.”

She nodded. Walked out.

Marmalade lifted her head, watched the door close, then looked at me for exactly one second — the particular look of a cat who has seen this case before and knows how it ends.

She put her head back down.

Case closed.

The WebCopy System gives you the Brand Masterfile and everything that comes after it — a complete architecture for website copy that actually sounds like you. Get the system →

I’ve seen it more times than I can count.

A founder — smart, experienced, genuinely good at what they do — sits down to write their website copy. They’ve got an AI tool open in one tab and their competitor’s website open in another. They type something like “write a homepage for a brand storytelling consultant.”

They hit enter.

And out comes a page full of “transformational solutions,” “client-centric experiences,” and enough corporate filler to make a Fortune 500 PR team proud.

They stare at it for a second.

Then they hit “regenerate.”

Same thing, slightly different arrangement.

That’s not a prompting problem. That’s an infrastructure problem.

What You’re Actually Feeding the Machine

Here’s the thing most people never figure out: AI doesn’t have an opinion about your brand. It doesn’t know your story, your origin, your voice, your people. It knows the mathematical average of everything it’s ever read — which is, by definition, the blurry center of the bell curve.

When you give it a lazy input, it gives you back the internet’s consensus. Which is every other founder’s copy. Which is no one’s copy.

And the cost isn’t just bad words on a page. It’s what search engines — and more importantly, real people — do when they land on messaging that sounds like it was written by no one about nothing. They leave.

Quietly. Without telling you why.

The Shift That Changes Everything

Stop thinking about better prompts.

Start thinking about better infrastructure.

AI is a tool. That’s it. When you feed it something thin, it gives you something thin. When you feed it the real, unpolished, documented truth of your business — your specific stories, your actual voice, your clients’ exact words — it has no choice but to give you something that sounds like you.

That’s what a Brand Masterfile does. It becomes the raw narrative DNA of your business. A permanent reference that you build once and feed into every AI session, every piece of copy, every piece of content — so you’re not starting from zero every single time.

Three parts. Let me walk you through them.

Step 1 — Excavate the Brand DNA

This is where most people flinch.

Not because it’s complicated. Because it’s uncomfortable.

You have to dig up the real origin story. Not the polished version. Not the LinkedIn summary version. The actual version — the moment of frustration that started everything, the thing you swore you’d do differently, the values you’d burn the whole thing down before compromising.

That’s the stuff that goes in.

Here’s what I mean in practice. Most founders write something like: “We have 15 years of experience in regional trade operations.”

Fine. Forgettable.

The excavated version sounds more like: “I started this HVAC business with a beat-up 2011 Ford Transit, a toolbox my grandfather gave me, and a vow that I’d never lie to a homeowner about a cracked heat exchanger just to make a sale.”

Same story, different depth.

One sounds like a website. One sounds like a person.

Modern search engines reward trust and clear brand signals. Real people buy from people. The sanitized version loses both audiences.

Step 2 — Map Your Echo Discovery Lanes

Your clients are telling you exactly how to sell to them.

You’re just not writing it down.

When a stressed client calls you, they don’t say “We’re experiencing infrastructural disruptions in our operational workflow.” They say something like: “My downstairs toilet is overflowing, my in-laws get here in two hours, and the last guy I called never even showed up.”

That’s the voice you need to capture.

Echo Discovery Lanes are exactly what they sound like — documented lanes of real audience language. Direct quotes from client calls and conversations. The words that show up in reviews. The phrases people use when they’re relieved you fixed the thing.

When you feed an AI model the real words your people use, it stops defaulting to formal, clinical language. It writes to the cadence of an actual human being in an actual situation. Because that’s what you gave it.

Step 3 — Set Hard Voice Guardrails

AI has bad habits.

Left to itself, it will open every piece with “In today’s fast-paced world.” It will use “elevate” and “revolutionize” like they’re punctuation. It will pile adjectives onto every claim until the thing collapses under its own inflation.

Voice guardrails are the filter.

You tell the model explicitly what your brand is and what it absolutely is not. You ban words. You define the cadence. You instruct it to write the way a specific person with a specific perspective actually talks.

For Copyflight, that sounds something like: “Write in a front-porch tone — conversational, direct, human. No exclamation points. Never use ‘elevate,’ ‘revolutionize,’ or ‘seamless.’ Keep paragraphs short. Trust the reader.”

That’s not being precious about word choice. That’s protecting the thing that makes your brand yours.

Christina wrote this about the Brand Masterfile:

The Two Landmines

The drift problem. Even with a solid Masterfile, if you don’t anchor the AI to it at the start of every session, it starts sliding back toward generic within a few exchanges. Four or five prompts in, you’re back to mediocre. Open every session with your Masterfile. Every time.

The polish problem. This one’s sneakier. You dig up a real, gritty, human story from your history — and then you sand all the edges off it because it doesn’t sound “professional” enough. That’s the moment you lose the only thing that made it worth keeping.

The gritty details aren’t a liability. They’re the differentiation.

The raw truth of your business is the one thing AI can’t fabricate.

What usually trips people up when they try to write this stuff themselves isn’t the strategy — it’s figuring out which pieces of their story actually matter to a customer. That’s the part worth getting right.

If you’re not sure where to start, the Legacy Story Quiz takes about two minutes and points directly at the gap. → Legacy Story Quiz

Or if you’d rather take a look at the WebCopy System, find that here → WebCopy System