Etch/Blog
The Ledger.
What actually moved the number. The things we have learned the hard way for our own clients, about ads, email, websites and AI, written plainly with the arithmetic showing. One entry a week.
9 entries · a new one every week
The archive
Earlier entries.
Nothing in that column yet.
The diagnosis
16 October 2026 · The diagnosis · 6 min
You paid for search ads. Where did the ads actually run?
A client thought it was buying Google search ads. When we connected the account to the website’s analytics, most of the campaign was running as banner ads. The average visit lasted seven seconds. Before you change your budget, check what you are buying.
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The machine
14 October 2026 · The machine · 4 min
Every automatic message you send is missing one line.
Missed-call texts, chat replies, Facebook auto-replies. They go out in seconds and get read in minutes, and most of them end at “we’ll get back to you.” One line turns each of them into a booking.
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The machine
11 October 2026 · The machine · 7 min
What’s an engine, and does your business need one?
An engine is a dashboard built around your business. It reads every system you already pay for against the others and shows where the money goes. Most owners won’t log into it, so it also sends one page, once a month.
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The machine
17 September 2026 · The machine · 8 min
What an AI agent is, what it is not, and the first chores to hand one.
A chatbot answers. An agent acts: it reads your records, uses your tools and finishes a chore. Here is the honest version of what that means for a small company, what it is never allowed to do, and the three chores worth handing one first.
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The machine
13 September 2026 · The machine · 8 min
What AI had ready before six on Monday, and what it is not.
Before anyone sat down, the report was written, the agent email was drafted and the weekend lead had been texted back. Here is what the machine is, what it is not, and the arithmetic on both.
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The arithmetic
11 September 2026 · The arithmetic · 6 min
Your email platform’s revenue number is probably five times too big.
A client’s campaign screens added up to $1.5 million in three months. The same repair orders, counted once, came to $300,000. Nothing was wrong with the emails. The counting was wrong, and it is wrong the same way almost everywhere.
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Email
10 September 2026 · Email · 6 min
Your email isn’t bad. It isn’t being delivered.
A client’s list opened at half a percent in Gmail and twenty-four percent everywhere else, on the same send, on the same day. Content does not discriminate by mailbox provider. Here is the five-minute test that tells you whether your problem is your writing or your DNS, and the order to fix it in.
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The machine
1 September 2026 · The machine · 8 min
Assessing AI in your marketing: five questions that settle it in an afternoon.
You have been pitched AI four times this quarter with no way to judge any of it. Here are the questions that settle it in an afternoon.
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Three columns, and nothing else.
One entry a week, and never one for the sake of it. If we have not learned something worth your time, you get a short week rather than filler.
The diagnosis.
Something is not working and the reason is not the obvious one. How to tell the difference in five minutes rather than five months, using numbers you already have.
The arithmetic.
What a marketing move is actually worth, done out on paper. List size, response rate, average ticket, what it cost. No case study without the maths under it.
The machine.
Where AI genuinely helps at a marketing desk, where it quietly makes things worse, and what we will not let it do without a person reading it first.
The next entry
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