The Chaotic Good’s Guide to Digital Marketing
Part two of my alignment-chart series. Part one was The Lawful Good’s Guide to Digital Marketing, if you like your marketing with fewer felonies.
Back in 2022 I wrote The Chaotic Neutral’s Guide to Digital Marketing, a post I still can’t re-read without wincing. It was all happy accidents and bad decisions. Four years later I’ve picked a new alignment. Chaotic Good. Robin Hood, but with a contact form.
Here’s the deal. Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor, and the Sheriff of Nottingham called that a crime. I’m going to suggest something less felonious medieval: give away the stuff you were told to hoard, and watch what happens. Rules are suggestions. Generosity is the strategy.
(Editor’s note: Alex, Robin Hood stole things. You’re a Robin Hood who sends invoices. Sit down.) Alex, arguing with himself
I’d like to formally object to that note. But it’s fair.
First, meet Dale
Dale is not real. Dale is also probably you, and I say that with love.
Dale runs a small company that does something useful. Somewhere in his office there’s a drawer, and in that drawer is a three-ring binder labeled PROCESS (DO NOT LOOK), made on a label maker that Dale was a little too excited to own. The drawer has a lock. I’ve seen this lock. A stern paperclip could take it.
Inside the binder is how Dale does the thing he does. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, about 40% “TBD” and 15% a coffee ring. Dale is certain a competitor would kill for it. Nobody has ever tried to steal it. Nobody has ever tried to open the drawer.
Hold onto Dale. He’s going to come back, and he’s going to be fine.
1. Publish the binder
Your internal SOPs, your checklists, the scoping doc you spend a week on before anyone’s signed anything. Put them on the internet. Yes, the real ones.
The reasoning is dumb simple. Hulk Hogan’s leg drop was never a secret. Everyone in the building knew it was coming, and the crowd still lost its mind every single time, because knowing the move was never the hard part. Doing it, in the ring, in front of people, with the right timing, was. Your process works the same way. A competitor can read your checklist and still can’t be you.
We did a version of this when we gave away a detailed scope for free before any contract existed. And how we operate is sitting on the approach page for anyone to read. Nobody has asked me to take it down. I keep checking.
How to do it: pick one process you’re proud of, strip the client names, and publish it as a post or a plain page. Start with the boring one. The boring one is always the one people share.
Net Result: Prospects arrive already understanding how you work, so the sales call stops being a pitch and starts being a “so, when can we start?”
2. Build the free thing that is actually useful
Not a lead magnet. A PDF behind a form is a toll booth wearing a gift bow. I mean a tool that does a real job even if the person never buys a thing from you.
Our version is the free SEO + AI Visibility Snapshot. You give us your domain, we run our toolkit on your site, and a real person reviews the results before anything is sent. What comes back is a plain-English read of what’s helping, what’s hurting, and what to fix first, including how AI assistants are likely to treat your site. No plugin install, no 40-page PDF of red X’s. Want a hand fixing it? There’s a link for that. If not, you still keep your list.
Is it a little scary to hand that out? Sure. A voice in my head says “that’s what we charge for.” Then I remember that the snapshot tells people what’s wrong, and fixing it is a completely different job. The first one is a flashlight. The second one is the plumber.
How to do it: take the question you answer on every first call and build the smallest thing that answers it without you in the room.
Net Result: People who use it trust you before they’ve paid you, which is the cheapest trust you’ll ever buy.
3. Open the toolbox
If you write code, even a little, publish the little stuff. I keep some of my snippets public on GitHub, and I’m not saying that to sound cool. Most of it is small and solves one annoying problem. That’s the point.
Back when we rebuilt digisavvy.com, we ended up with a pile of tiny single-purpose plugins that each do one job. Putting that kind of thing out in the open is the digital version of leaving a box of free tomatoes on your porch. Somebody takes one. Somebody says “oh, these are good.” A third person asks if you also do the other thing.
No code? Same move with templates, spreadsheets, or a prompt library. Share it, put your name on it, and let people argue with it. Arguments are just attention wearing a hard hat.
Net Result: Strangers become users, users become advocates, and someone eventually opens an issue that makes your tool better than you could have on your own. Free QA, with feelings.
4. Answer the question, not the link
Go where your people already ask for help: a subreddit, a Slack group, a forum, the comment section of some weirdly specific YouTube tutorial. Then do the thing nobody does. Give them a real, complete answer. Not a teaser. Not “great question, we wrote a guide, link in bio.” The actual answer, with the parts you’d usually save for a paid engagement.
I know. Your marketing brain is screaming. Mine is too. But here’s what I’ve noticed: nobody remembers the guy who dropped a link and left. Everybody remembers the person who wrote six helpful paragraphs at 11pm on a Tuesday and then said “happy to go deeper if that helps.”
How to do it: pick two communities, set a timer for 20 minutes a day, and answer what you actually know. A link is a bonus, never the answer.
Net Result: A reputation that compounds. Over time people start tagging you into threads, which is the closest thing the internet has to a standing ovation.
5. Refer the lead you can’t serve
A person emails you. They need something you don’t do, or can’t do well, or can’t do for the budget they have. The reflex is to quietly ghost them or take the job anyway and suffer.
Chaotic good says: tell them the truth, and point them to someone who can help. By name. With a warm intro if you can swing it.
Think of it like a tag team. When the partner who’s out of gas tags in the fresh one, nobody boos. The fans actually respect it, and the crowd remembers who made the tag. Same here. The person you referred remembers. The person you referred them to remembers, and starts sending you work you do want.
How to do it: keep a short list of people you’d trust with your own mom’s website. Next time you say no, hand one over with a two-line intro email.
Net Result: Fewer bad-fit projects, more goodwill, and eventually referrals that boomerang back to you.
6. Teach the DIY version of what you sell
This one feels like setting your own house on fire. Teach people to do, themselves, the thing you charge for.
We did it with the 5-minute AI visibility self-check, which walks a small business owner through checking their own site without us. Everything on it is something they could do alone. Some will. Some will get ten minutes in, hit the rabbit hole, and call us. Reading Rainbow figured this out decades ago: you don’t have to take my word for it.
Same logic behind our post on the first five automations a small business should set up. Anyone can follow it. The ones who’d rather not will remember who explained it clearly.
How to do it: write the version of your service a smart, motivated beginner could follow alone. If it feels too complete, you’re doing it right.
Net Result: The DIYers love you and tell people. The ones who hit a wall hire you, and they arrive pre-educated and far less likely to argue about the invoice.
So what happened to Dale
I can’t tell you, because Dale’s fictional. But I can tell you what I’d bet.
Dale finally unlocks the drawer, takes out the binder, fixes the 40% “TBD”, and posts the whole thing on his website. Nobody steals it. A few people read it and quietly stop being scared of the work he does. Somebody sends him a note that starts with “I didn’t realize it was this organized.”
And the drawer? He keeps the lock. It was never protecting anything. It was just there. Dale’s still got that stern paperclip.
That’s the gist, folks. Give the playbook away, do the thing anyway, and keep grinding. You can still win when everyone knows your moves. Hogan did, in a yellow bandana, for years.
One more thing, and I mean this part: generosity isn’t a tactic you swap in for strategy. Give away something you’d be proud to be known for, and give it away on purpose. Otherwise you’re just a guy leaving free tomatoes on a porch with no plan.
