A few of the companies we’ve written for
Plus LiveData, and a couple of decades of work under other people’s bylines.
More content is being created than ever before, and most of it is garbage. Great content with an original point of view or an interesting perspective cuts through better than ever, earning the trust of potential customers and buyers while earning the attention of crawlers from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Plus LiveData, and a couple of decades of work under other people’s bylines.
Every business and agency is thinking that ChatGPT or Claude is good enough to produce their content. The mistake they're making is not recognizing that good enough no longer cuts it with customers, search engines, and answer engines. Generative LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT are fantastic for performing research, creating a brief or outline, and even a first draft. But if you want your content to represent your brand voice, resonate with readers, rank with search and answer engines, and lead to business growth, you need a human subject matter expert at the end of the production line to edit, polish, and enhance the draft.
When every competitor can produce competent AI content, competent stops being an edge. It's the entry fee. The bar just moved up, not down.
A model has no opinion on which of your offers deserves the next six weeks of content, or which claim is technically true but wrong for this buyer. That call gets made by someone who's watched what actually closes.
If your most expensive person is the one prompting the model, that's a six figure employee doing the job of an intern. The real question was never whether AI can write it. It's who's holding the pen.
Our copywriters and researchers have crafted thousands of great blog posts, whitepapers, and ebooks for dozens of companies over the last decade. We were helping businesses like yours grow through great content long before AI started making graffiti a cottage industry.
The flood of generic AI content didn't kill content marketing. It raised the importance, and the payoff, of sounding like you actually know what you're talking about. That's the opening, and now is the time to take advantage.
Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of slop. The honest question was never whether AI touches the work. It's what it's allowed to decide.
First we look at competitors, market dynamics, review sites, and sales conversations (if allowed) to identify hidden opportunities to reach potential customers using their own language.
Every page is built for three readers now: the human visiting the site, a search crawler, and an answer engine. We structure for all three with headings, schema, and passages that deliver value, convey clear meaning, and can be lifted cleanly, so the piece can be found and cited, not just published.
Internal links are placed with purpose. Each one moves the reader into and further down your funnel, not into a "related posts" dead end.
We keep a live map of what competitors are saying and, as important, what they aren't saying. Those gaps inform a dynamic strategy optimized in real time. Someone else can use an outdated keyword volume spreadsheet.
"None of that is where the writing actually happens. That part still needs someone in the room who knows what's true about your business, your buyer, and your last ten deals, plus the discipline to say only that."
“The Friendly Ghostwriter has been key to LiveData increasing the effectiveness of our thought leadership and blog campaigns. Colin consistently delivers outstanding content that required very little rework from our side. I highly recommend working with him to anyone in need of concise, focused content.”
Dave Beebe
Sr. Director, Marketing — LiveData
“Content that converts isn’t just about SEO and traffic, it’s about content that people actually WANT to read. Friendly Ghostwriter delivers in that regard, helping build rapport and trust, which is what content SHOULD do.”
“Even though we are growing quickly, we are still small. Our marketing budget is tiny so every investment is precious. Even in a transactional space, the posts and product descriptions written by Colin drive more conversions.”
A marketing team came in with a documented content strategy, a real editorial calendar, and a lead who knew exactly what "good" looked like. What they didn't have was the throughput to hit that bar every week, on schedule, without it consuming their internal team.
We didn't rewrite their strategy. We executed it at the standard they'd already set for themselves, using the same signal and structure system above, with a human in the room on every piece before it shipped.
A small network of veterinary clinics had never run a content program. No strategy, no dedicated writer, no blog worth mentioning, just word of mouth and whatever came up in local search by accident. They handed the whole thing to us because they had nowhere else to start from.
We built the strategy, the voice, and the production pipeline from a blank page: competitor and review-site research to find what pet owners were actually asking, a content structure built for local search and answer engines, and a publishing cadence the clinics never had to think about again.
Both are wrong for different reasons.
Good, we're not here to replace it. We're here to execute it at the level you set, consistently, without it becoming one more thing your team has to hold together.
Show me the gap →You're right about the flood. You're wrong that it means the channel's dead. It means the bar just dropped for everyone except the people still doing it well.
Show me the opening →Yes, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of slop. AI is genuinely useful for research, building an outline, and finding good internal links.
It does not write the piece. Every word that ships is written, edited and reviewed by a human who knows what is true about your business, your buyer, and your last ten deals.
Very likely. More than twenty years of writing across a fairly wide spread:
It depends on subject matter, how much research is required, and how much we are writing for you. Most clients work on a retainer of at least two pieces a month, which is also where the writing gets best, because capturing a voice takes repetition.
Ask and you will get a real number, not a discovery call to get one.
Less than you would think. Access to what you already know: a sales call recording, a competitor you keep losing to, the objection you answer every week. The research and structure are our job.
Tell us what you are publishing now and what it is supposed to be doing for you. If we are not the right fit we will say so.
No pressure, no generic pitch. Just a real look at what's working, what isn't, and what it would take to change that.