Hi, I'm John

Started in face-to-face sales selling milk, water filters, cars, and oil. Got obsessed with the psychology of why people buy after reading about an envelope from 1928 that made an extra $4,000 in sales (about $72,000 today) by changing seven words. Built my first website in 2005 when SEO was the wild west, ranked health pages on page one of Google, and have built over 100 sites since. Now I write for businesses who need senior content and copy without the senior salary, and a writing engine I've spent two years building does half the heavy lifting.

Photograph taken on a good day. Most days I look more like the engine I built... functional, slightly worn, gets the job done.

The envelope story

In 1928 a marketer was staring at a postage envelope. You know the bit where it says "stick stamp here"? He changed that out and replaced it with seven words: "A penny here will bring back dollars."

Same envelope, same audience, same offer. The new version pulled in an extra $4,000 of sales, which is roughly $72,000 in today's money. I read that story and got hooked. Tiny words move people in ways nobody sees coming, and that is the whole game I've been playing for forty years now.

The sales years

Started selling face-to-face in my teens and never quite stopped. B2B and B2C, cold calling, door knocking, phone systems, cars, milk, oil, water filters. Strange list, I know, but the training was unreal.

People rarely tell you the real reason they hesitate. They give you surface objections like price or timing or "I need to think about it," but the real one is buried somewhere underneath. After enough years you learn to answer the unspoken question before they ask it. Bit creepy, probably, but effective. I made plenty of mistakes along the way too, the kind that still wake me at 3am twenty years later, but those mistakes taught me more than any course ever could.

What stuck with me from those years is that markets shift constantly, technology shifts faster, but people are remarkably consistent. Same fears, same shortcuts, same buying triggers as a hundred years ago.

Twenty years of SEO

While the sales work was happening, I built a health website and ranked multiple pages on page one of Google. SEO back then had no rulebook, just experiments, watching what worked, doing more of that. You could get away with things twenty years ago that would get you laughed at today, or penalised, or both.

So I spent years learning the fundamentals that survive algorithm changes rather than the tricks that die in the next update. Search intent, entity relationships, why some content ranks and other content sinks without trace. Voice search now, AI search now, half-formed questions typed into ChatGPT at 11pm. The platforms shift. The human psychology underneath does not.

What changed in 2023

AI changed how content gets made, but it also broke the bottom of the market. Every business now has access to the same models, the same prompts, the same plug-and-play tools that everyone else has. The result is a flood of technically-correct, commercially-dead content that nobody reads, nobody links to, and nobody buys from.

That gap is what I spent two years building for. The writing engine behind my work is the part that turns AI from a fancy autocomplete into something useful. I won't tell you what's in it, but you'll see what it does. Across multiple niches, in your brand voice, with every claim traced back to a real source.

The thing nobody tells you is that AI writes words and does it well, but it cannot build strategy, audit a site against its real competitors, or translate your business goals into a search visibility plan. That part still needs someone who has done the work for years.

Where to next

The case for hiring me lives on /hire →. The longer pitch with proof, process, and the production engine in detail.

The work itself lives on /words-at-work →. Ad teardowns, opinion pieces, comparison articles. Pick whichever ones tell you what you need to know about how I write.

Or just contact me →. Reply will be from me, inside twenty-four hours, and I mean me typing into an inbox.