I build content programs that earn authority, not just traffic.
There is a difference between content that performs and content that compounds. Content that performs gets a spike in traffic, maybe a featured snippet, maybe a social share. Content that compounds builds topical ownership over time — it earns backlinks without asking for them, surfaces in AI-generated answers without being optimized specifically for them, and keeps working long after the campaign that produced it has ended.
Building the second kind requires more than writing skill or SEO knowledge. It requires a coherent strategy, a disciplined editorial process, and a deep understanding of how both human readers and AI systems evaluate what they read. That intersection is where I work.
From Educator to Strategist
I did not start in marketing. I started in a classroom.
For ten years, I taught instrumental and vocal music to students from fourth grade through high school at Montrose School District in South Dakota, and also directed a Recording Arts and Music Production program that I built from scratch. I managed budgets, designed curriculum, developed systems for tracking student progress, organized competitions and performances, and figured out how to make complex concepts accessible to people who had never encountered them before.
That last part turned out to be the most transferable skill I have.
Teaching music, particularly to students who are not yet musicians, requires you to break a complex discipline into its constituent parts, find the entry point that makes sense for a specific learner, and build understanding in a sequence that actually sticks. It requires patience with complexity, precision in language, and a genuine interest in how understanding is constructed rather than just transmitted.
I did not know at the time that those skills would become the foundation of a content marketing career. But they did.
The Pivot
After a decade in education, I spent several years leading worship and creative programming at two churches in South Dakota, roles that required developing live productions, communicating complex ideas to diverse audiences, managing volunteers and contributors, and maintaining a consistent organizational voice across everything from Sunday services to team alignment.
When I transitioned into professional content marketing and freelance writing in the early 2010s, I brought that entire background with me: the curriculum designer’s instinct for how information should be sequenced, the educator’s commitment to clarity, the worship leader’s comfort with logistics and coordination, and the communicator’s understanding that the hardest part of any content challenge is not finding something to say; it is finding the right way to say it for the specific person who needs to hear it.
Building the Practice
Over the next 10+ years of freelance and agency work, I built a content practice that covered a genuinely unusual range of industries: specialty construction, industrial supply, court-focused drug testing technology, speech-language pathology nonprofits, renewable energy infrastructure, high-end e-commerce, and B2B professional services.
That range was not accidental. I have always been drawn to technically complex, niche subject matter, the kind that most content writers avoid because it requires extensive research investment and genuine intellectual engagement. Explaining how anaerobic digestion works to renewable energy investors. Describing the toxicology of P2P methamphetamine for a drug court audience. Making the evidence base for stuttering therapy accessible to speech-language pathologists who are trained clinicians but not researchers. These are hard content problems. They are also the most interesting ones.
That pattern of choosing hard problems in specialized markets is what eventually led me to my current work at Cannonball Digital (formerly Clixable, where I served as Content Strategy Manager before the agency’s recent acquisition) and to the specific expertise I have developed in AI-driven search.
Finding the Frontier
In early 2023, when ChatGPT became publicly available, I did what I do with most things I find genuinely interesting: I pushed it as hard as I could to understand what it was actually capable of. I spent a day testing its content generation limits and documented the entire experiment, including a full AI-generated SaaS landing page mockup, in a published case study that became one of my earliest pieces of AI-focused thought leadership.
That experiment was the beginning of a sustained, serious engagement with how large language models process, evaluate, and surface content. Over the following two years, as Google launched AI Overviews, Perplexity gained traction, and enterprise buyers began using AI tools as a primary research channel, I was already building and testing the content architectures that perform in those environments.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are not side interests for me. They are the area where I believe the most consequential content strategy work is happening right now, and where I have invested the most deliberate effort to develop genuine methodology rather than surface familiarity.
What I Have Learned
After seven years of running content programs at the agency level and fifteen years of building things from scratch in resource-constrained environments, I have developed a few strong convictions about what makes content strategy work:
Strategy without execution is a document. The most valuable content leaders I have observed are the ones who can set direction and then personally do the hardest parts of the work, not just brief others. I write. I edit. I make the calls on what to cut. I produce the flagship pieces. That hands-on engagement with the craft is what keeps strategic judgment calibrated.
Complexity is not the enemy of clarity; it is the prerequisite for it. You cannot simplify something you do not genuinely understand. The content that earns the most authority in any specialized market is the content that got the complexity right first, then made it accessible. Skipping the first step produces content that feels thin to the audience that knows the subject best.
Content compounds when it is built around ideas, not keywords. Keyword-driven content produces individual articles that rank and decay. Idea-driven content produces topical ecosystems that build on each other, earn citations from adjacent content, and surface in AI-generated answers because they genuinely cover a subject better than anything else available.
The best content strategy is invisible. When a reader encounters content that earns their trust, they rarely think about the structure, the entity optimization, or the intent-alignment decisions that made it work. They just feel like they found exactly what they were looking for. That invisibility is the goal.
What I’m Looking For
I am currently seeking senior and director-level roles where I can bring strategic ownership, hands-on content craft, and a deep understanding of AI-driven search to a team doing work that matters.
The environments where I do my best work tend to share a few qualities:
The subject matter is genuinely complex. Sophisticated buyers, technical products, specialized industries — these are the contexts where the gap between average content and authoritative content is widest, and where strong strategy creates the most durable competitive advantage.
Content is treated as a strategic function, not a production line. I am not looking to manage a content factory. I am looking to own the narrative, set the editorial bar, and build programs that compound.
There is room to operate with real autonomy. I work best when I have clear goals, direct access to stakeholders and subject matter experts, and the trust to make editorial and strategic decisions without heavy approval layers.
The team is serious about AI-driven search. More than a preference, this is where the search landscape is going, and I want to be building in organizations that are ahead of that shift rather than reacting to it.
Roles I’m actively exploring:
- Content Marketing Manager / Senior Content Marketing Manager
- Director of Content Marketing or Content Strategy
- Content Strategy Lead
- SEO / GEO / AEO Strategist or Lead
- GTM Content Strategy
Industries where I have the deepest context: B2B SaaS, fintech, healthcare and healthcare-adjacent, legal and compliance, specialty construction and industrial, nonprofit.
Remote preferred. Open to hybrid for the right role and organization.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
(personality and working style — the human layer)
I am a fast learner by necessity and by preference. My career has required me to build real working knowledge of drug court policy, construction technology, peristaltic pump manufacturing, renewable natural gas infrastructure, and speech-language pathology (among other things) in order to produce content that those industries’ insiders find credible. I have gotten reasonably good at it. When I encounter a new technical domain, my instinct is to find the most credible primary sources, talk to the people who know it best, and stay with the complexity until I can render it accurately.
I ask a lot of questions before I start writing. The most common mistake in content strategy is solving the wrong problem with excellent execution. I would rather spend extra time at the brief stage ensuring I understand the real audience, the real question they need answered, and the real outcome the content is meant to produce than produce something polished that misses the point.
I have strong opinions about quality and I hold the line on them. It looks like perfectionism to the untrained eye, but I can move fast when speed is the right call. It is about the conviction that content that is not genuinely better than what already exists on a topic is not worth publishing. That standard has occasionally made me the most annoying person in a content review meeting. It has also produced the results that are on this site.
I am a systems thinker who also loves the craft. Building the editorial calendar, developing the content framework, establishing the workflow. I genuinely enjoy that architecture work. And I also genuinely enjoy sitting down to write a difficult piece and making it good. The combination is rarer than it should be, and I think it is the most important thing I bring to a senior content role.
Education & Background
Bachelor of Arts, University of Sioux Falls
Professional development: Ongoing self-directed study in GEO/AEO methodology, large language model content behavior, AI-assisted content workflows, and B2B content strategy. Active practitioner since 2023 in AI-search content architecture.
Let’s Connect
If what you’ve read here sounds like someone your team needs, I’d welcome a conversation.
View My Portfolio | See My GEO/AEO Work | Connect on LinkedIn