Field notes: what ten years of marketing taught me about what matters
Every trade has two bodies of knowledge. There is the version in the books, and there is the version you write down after the books meet a client, a budget, and a deadline.
I call the second version field notes. They are the lessons that survived contact with the work: tested on my own money, my own clients, and my own mistakes. This page holds the ones that held for ten years, and each one opens into a longer piece where the full story lives.
Here is why they matter to you. The books are available to your competitors, and by now the chatbots have read all of them. Field notes are the part nobody can look up.
Tactics expire; experience compounds
I have watched the cycle enough times to set a clock by it. A technique works, word spreads, the marketplace copies it, and the technique stops working, sometimes completely. Cold email had its year. So did content volume, exact-match domains, and a dozen LinkedIn formats.
So I stopped selling tactics and started asking what survives the cycle. The answer has not changed yet: a clear service, a genuine voice, and the experience only you have lived. Tactics expire on a schedule you don't control. Your experience compounds on a schedule that belongs to you.
The full ledger of what I have dropped over the years belongs to its own piece, marketing beliefs I've abandoned. Writing it was uncomfortable. Reading it will save you money.
Traffic is an input, and the conversion gap is the lesson
The biggest engagement of my career grew a business coach's website from a few hundred visitors a month to tens of thousands, with first-place national rankings behind it. It remains the proof I lean on that publishing genuine expertise builds national visibility.
It also taught me the harder lesson: converting that traffic into appointments stayed difficult the whole way. Visibility and conversion are two different systems, and building the first does not build the second (the full story is in how I took a business coach from hundreds of visitors to a national audience).
That gap now shapes every promise I make. Traffic is an input. What matters is what receives it.
The client's hours set the ceiling
I tell every client the same sentence early, because it is the least flattering thing I know and the most useful: you will become your biggest bottleneck.
The systems I build run on captured experience, and only the client has lived it. When a client can give one hour a week, the work moves at one hour a week, and no amount of my effort changes that arithmetic. The client who commits the hours gets a launch in weeks; the pace lesson has its own piece, on the client who only had one hour a week.
The corollary matters more than the complaint: depth of input sets quality of output, in marketing and in most things.
The questions are the product
For years I thought my product was the deliverables. The websites, the articles, the campaigns. I now think the most valuable hours in any engagement are the interviews, because the questions decide what everything else can be.
Ask shallow questions and you get the brochure version of a business, the version a stranger could have written. Ask the uncomfortable ones, the specific client, the case that went sideways, the advice they'd give against their own interest, and you reach the material that makes a reader trust one expert over another. The uncomfortable questions get their own piece, because they deserve one.
Working alone is a strategy, and so is saying no
Two decisions shaped this practice more than any tactic. I work alone, with Claude, because every handoff loses fidelity and the person who hears your stories should be the person who builds with them. And I stopped chasing local clients, because a diffuse identity gives buyers no reason to choose you specifically.
Both choices cost me revenue in the short term. Both compound. Each carries its own field note, on working alone and on leaving local behind, with the honest accounting of what each decision gave up.
Temper every claim, including mine
Ten years of watching this industry left me with one standing rule: take the established advice, then go read how it is going for the people implementing it, in the forums and the groups where nobody is selling anything. The gap between the pitch and the practitioner reports is where the truth lives.
I hold my own claims to the same test, which is why this page contains no promises. These notes say what happened when I did the work: what compounded, what expired, and what it cost to learn the difference.
What matters, after ten years
Strip the decade down and three things remain. Experience, captured while you still remember the details. A presence that confirms what people hear about you. And claims you can stand behind when a smart buyer checks.
The rest was tactics, and the tactics came and went.
You have your own version of this page, whether or not you have written it. What would your field notes say?
