Using the power of BLOGGING to change the world!

My first blogging client was an old family friend.  Sound familiar?  But I make no apologies.  This wasn’t just any family friend who was truly “part of the family,” but a top executive for a big health care company whose marketing department was in disarray.  He had wanted to hire me for the past twenty years but could never get around corporate by-laws that precluded nepotism.  Even though we weren’t blood relatives, he was very concerned about any preponderance of bias.  He was an old and dear friend of the family’s, and he had worked for two of my siblings during different tours of duty in his career.

In 2016, he felt that he had no choice.  He had lost his entire marketing department in the course of a month due to various life-change circumstances.  He managed to get one staff member back to take over the company’s marketing director spot, but they both knew they needed outside help.  

He had a strategy for using blogs that he had been wanting to deploy for a long time, but did not have confidence in the cookie-cutter industry writers who were charging $200 per hour for fluff.  And with all that was going on with the marketing, the timing was never right.  

But now that I had availability after my role in a start-up in Dublin, Ireland was “sunset-ing,” he approached me with an idea.  Start a ghostwriting business using my first and middle name (instead of my last name), and create an LLC for this company under a cryptic name.  I chose Spiritus Writing (using the Latin word for ghost), and a dream was born.

For my first client, it was a brochure for a new client’s employee health fair that was promoting the launch of the company’s new wellness portal.  The marketing director was so pleased with my first draft that she sent it right over to compliance, very pleased that she did not have to make a single edit.  The success of this first project led to me being assigned to the ultimate goal – ghostwriting blogs for the company’s executives and clinicians, including that old family friend.

“Don’s blogging helped us drive more sales by raising brand awareness and boosting our rankings on product pages and Google,” my “client” would tell the world, and he had the metrics to prove it.  “We would give him the topics with limited directions, and he would do the research and writing with great speed and execution.  And he had little or no experience in writing about the type of patients (and their related conditions) who buy our products.  I truly believe that it was his fresh approach and passion for the subject matter that helped us deliver a successful blog strategy.”

As I was continuing to serve this client with blogs, patient emails, enterprise sales packets and other projects during my first full year, I landed my second client.  I met him the old fashioned way – in a bar! He had to close his start-up after failing to get a second round of funding, but landed on his feet with an IT consulting firm specializing in staffing and big data solutions.  He knew I had NO EXPERIENCE IN IT, but he knew I could write – and his company needed help…with RFPs, content marketing, and HR documentation.   

Soon after, I was recruiting more clients and have had the privilege of helping them deliver quality business solutions through my writing in other areas – pitch competitions for diverse vendor awards, video presentation scripts (and even voiceovers!), updating Employee Manuals and Training Guides, product launches, and documenting OPT orientations.  It was life-affirming for me to realize that quality writing can make a powerful impact for businesses in a number of areas (including compliance with the developing immigration laws governing labor). But it’s been especially gratifying to know that blogging can be such an important driver for a multitude of business initiatives.  Target audiences in any aspect of the value chain crave that personal touch to communications.  They want to know what that vendor, co-supplier or subject matter expert is “really” thinking about, and they love a good story.