You built the engine. I have run one.
An engine survives or dies on the forty-fifth article of the month, when nobody is watching as closely as they watched the first. I ran one for two years. Fifteen client accounts, forty-plus articles a month, every week, on deadline. Six projects below, and what each one asked of me.
You said bring your personality. Under two minutes of it.
Most teams have more ideas than published work
The gap between the two usually comes down to one person. Someone who turns up on Tuesday and writes the thing, then does it again on Wednesday, and keeps the standard steady through a month where the deadlines do not move.
That was my job at a Hamilton agency. Competing deadlines, clients who checked their numbers on Monday morning. I learned digital marketing the way most people learn anything useful, in volume and under pressure.
Your ad says the pillars are built and the ideas are waiting. That is the part I would want on day one.
Six projects, and what each one demanded
All six are live. Each one needed a different thing from me.
Duoplus, website copywriting
Digital marketing agency. Homepage and key service pages.
A marketing agency has the hardest sell in marketing. Its buyers have been promised growth before and still have the invoices to show how that went. The relaunch had to convert people who arrived sceptical.
I wrote the homepage and the main service pages, working directly with the managing director and with the project manager reviewing. The structure follows StoryBrand. Name the frustration before naming yourself, prove you understand it, then lay out a plan simple enough to picture.
The section carrying the most weight walks through the cost of waiting, because that is the decision the reader came to make.
Kapiti Woodfires, SEO page build in Bricks, plus copywriting
Fireplace retailer. Website relaunch, homepage rewrites, blog articles, special chimney sweep service page built from scratch.
Chimney sweeping was one of their strongest keywords and an obvious way into Wellington homes. A sweep is a small job, but it puts a technician in the house of someone who owns a woodburner, which is exactly who eventually buys a new fireplace.
So, I built the Wellington chimney sweep page to rank and to convert. It opens on the risk a homeowner cannot see, creosote and carbon monoxide, because that is what makes someone pick up the phone. It breaks the job into six components so the reader knows what they are paying for.
It publishes a price range and the four things that move it, which most trades sites refuse to do. Then suburbs for local search, the seven questions people actually ask, and a route through to the longer cost guide.
Raglan Reconnection Retreat, complete
website copywriting
Residential drug and alcohol rehab. Founder interviews, messaging framework, every page.
Troy and Kate take four guests at a time and have lived addiction themselves. Their site had to reach two people at once. Someone deciding whether to admit they need help, and a family member searching at 2am on their behalf.
I interviewed them both, built a set of guiding principles out of those conversations, and wrote every page against it. The copy carries real clinical credibility, DAPAANZ practitioners, GPs, CBT and AOD counselling, without sounding like an institution.
The entry point is a short self-assessment, because asking someone in that position to phone a stranger is too much on a first visit.
Interviewing Gretchen Traicos for the Custom Hair Company marketing feature.
Custom Hair Company, feature writing
Human hair wigs. Interview and long-form feature article.
A business that changes lives quietly, in a category most people will not discuss. The brief was a feature article. The risk was writing something nobody would finish.
I opened on a woman who had just won a promotion and then found she could not sit under her own office lights. One person's story, told properly and at length, with the product held back until the reader was invested.
Once that was on the page, everything the client needed said about craft, fitting and the difference human hair makes had somewhere to sit, because the reader already understood what was at stake. The piece turns on the idea of restoration, which is the word its customers use about themselves.
TRT, customer story
Heavy haulage engineering. Interview-led case study.
A New Zealand manufacturer had built the country's first 4x8 ESS low loader. Their audience was operators and engineers who would spot a wrong specification before finishing the paragraph.
I interviewed Phil Robertson, Senior Site Manager at Ceres Environmental, and built the piece around his account. Why they brought transport in-house, why they spent months choosing a manufacturer, what changed once they had a trailer that lifts to 1500mm, drops to 800mm and steers by remote from 100 metres away.
Every number had to be right and every claim had to survive someone who moves heavy machinery for a living. It also had to earn its keep commercially, linking through to the products it supports while still reading as journalism.
Systemax, website copywriting and product packaging
Commercial paint strippers. Full site plus product label redesign and copy.
Two products that look almost identical and do different jobs. A painter who picks the wrong one loses a day, so most of them stand there deciding.
I wrote the site as a decision path. A selector at the top, a side-by-side comparison of stripping times and paint layers, then a plain contrast between the job with a sander and the job with a stripper.
The same problem carried over to the cans. I worked with the managing director on redesigning and rewriting the labels, which is a different discipline again. No scrolling, no room to build an argument, and someone reading it in a hardware aisle with a job waiting.
This page is built on Rocketspark
Applying for a job marketing a website builder without using the website builder felt like the wrong way round. So, I signed up, took the trial and built this.
I went through the onboarding your customers go through. Set the title tag, wrote the meta description, received the welcome emails. The support emails were the part that stayed with me, turning up at each step offering help before I had thought to ask for it.
My CV and cover letter are with the SEEK application.
Working at Duoplus, a Hamilton digital marketing agency.
Kia ora Paul
Those are six of them. Six businesses I had to dive into before I could write a word, and there are plenty more stories to tell.
I am in Cambridge, five minutes from your office.