The Lawful Good’s Guide to Digital Marketing

A note before we begin: yes, I wrote a series of marketing guides based on the Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart because I’m confident it’s great for SEO and will clearly bring me exactly the clients who want to pay me. I am very smart. This is part one. You’ve been warned.

“Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Your estimated wait time is four minutes.”

I’d like to formally enter into the record that I have heard this sentence, delivered by a recorded woman with the calm of a regional bank’s night manager, for forty-one minutes. It was four minutes when I started. It was four minutes when I switched the phone to my other ear. It was still four minutes when I made an entire sandwich, one-handed, standing in the dark, like a man preparing for a siege.

The recording never said anything false, exactly. It just didn’t mean a word of it. And I can’t stop thinking about the person who recorded it, in a booth, nodding, and going home to dinner.

Keep that four minutes in your pocket. We’ll need it later.

Back in 2022 (I checked) I wrote The Chaotic Neutral’s Guide to Digital Marketing, a post I now describe as advice a cry for help. This is the chaotic sibling’s older, more disciplined cousin. We’re moving to the other end of the alignment chart: Lawful Good.

If you never rolled a character sheet, here’s the short version. Lawful Good is the Paladin. Follows the rules, keeps the oath, tells the truth even when it costs a sale. It’s Bret “The Hitman” Hart giving his sunglasses to a kid in the front row, every night, for no reason other than that’s the kind of guy he is. It’s the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon’s most upright hero lecturing a bunch of teenagers about the plan.

In marketing terms: a Paladin with a spreadsheet. No flaming sword. Just a very well-named folder and a stubborn refusal to fib.

(Editor’s note, also me: you did not “check” that it was 2022, you looked at the URL. Also, a Paladin doesn’t get to say “I checked” when he didn’t.) Fair. Moving on.

Here’s the pitch: boring virtue compounds. None of this goes viral. All of it quietly stacks up while the clever tactics fizzle. Six moves, in no particular order of holiness.

Put the price on the page

“Contact us for a quote” is the website version of the four-minute recording. It sounds helpful. It tells the visitor nothing. Meanwhile they have eleven other tabs open, and one of them has a number on it.

I’m not saying every business can post a flat price. Custom work is custom. But you can almost always post something:

• A starting price or a range, with the date you last checked it.
• What’s included, in plain words, and what isn’t.
• The two or three things that push the number up.

We do this ourselves on the pricing page, and I’ve written about why we quote fixed fees and why we give away a detailed scope for free. Did a few people see the number and leave? Sure. Good. That was a ten-minute call neither of us had to have.

Net Result: Fewer tire-kickers, shorter sales calls, and leads who show up already knowing the number. You also get to skip the part where you act surprised that they’re surprised.

Answer the two-star review

Everybody answers the five-star review. “Thanks so much, you’re the best!” Easy. A Paladin answers all of them, and saves their best work for the two-star.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: you’re not writing the reply for the unhappy customer. You’re writing it for the next stranger who scrolls down and reads it, slowly, with a credit card in their other hand.

My checklist:

1. Reply within a couple of business days. Not at 11 p.m. on the night you read it. Sleep on it.
2. Use their name and repeat the actual problem back, in your own words, without a single “but.”
3. State the one concrete thing you’re doing about it.
4. Offer one way to continue offline, once, and then stop talking.

What you don’t write is “We’re sorry you feel that way.” That’s an apology the way a parking ticket is a greeting card.

Net Result: The next reader sees a business that handles being wrong in public. Sometimes the two-star reviewer even edits it. That’s a nice bonus; the real prize is the stranger with the credit card.

Make unsubscribing one click, then do it today

This one isn’t even optional anymore, which is how you know it used to be a problem. Gmail and Yahoo expect bulk senders to offer one-click unsubscribe and process requests within two days. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM rules say you must honor an opt-out within 10 business days, and you can’t charge a fee or make anyone do more than reply or visit a single web page.

Those are the legal floors. A Lawful Good marketer doesn’t stand on the floor.

• Turn on the list-unsubscribe header in your email platform (it’s usually one toggle).
• No login. No “are you sure?” maze. No survey standing between a person and the door.
• Suppress the address the moment they click, not “within 10 business days.”
• Tell people the cadence at signup (“Thursdays, twice a month”), then send exactly that. A promise is a promise, even the small ones.

Net Result: A smaller list that’s actually listening, better inbox placement, and zero people typing your company name next to a swear word. I’ll take that trade every time.

UTM tags, but like a librarian

Librarians are the original Lawful Good. A librarian looks at a pile of chaos and says “this goes here, forever, and here’s the number.” You’re going to do that to your campaign links.

Analytics treats Email, email, and e-mail as three different channels. I have personally created at least two of those. I’d like to say I was young. I was not.

The fix is one document with a few rules:

• All lowercase, hyphens, no spaces. No exceptions, not even on a Friday.
• utm_source is the platform (linkedin), utm_medium is the type of channel (social, email, cpc), utm_campaign is a short slug plus a date (fall-audit-2026-10).
• Never tag links that stay on your own site. It overwrites where the visitor really came from.
• One person owns the sheet. Everybody else asks that person.

Net Result: In six months, “where did this lead come from?” has an answer that doesn’t involve a séance, a shrug, or a guy named “(direct)” taking credit for everything.

Alt text is marketing (so are captions)

Picture a screen reader announcing “IMG underscore four four seven one dot jpeg” to someone who came to your site to hire you. It’s the four-minute recording again: technically a message, completely useless.

Accessibility feels like homework, but it’s the rare good deed that also helps you get found, because search engines and AI tools read your text, not your vibes. What I do and recommend:

• Alt text is one plain sentence about what the image shows and why it’s there. Skip “image of.” Skip the keyword-stuffed sentence.
• Captions on every video, and a transcript if you can swing it.
• Link text that says where the link goes. “Read the pricing breakdown,” never “click here.”
• Check your text color against its background. If you have to squint, so does a lot of your audience.

Net Result: More people can use what you made, and the stuff you already published becomes easier for everyone, and everything, to understand.

Say when a robot helped

It’s 2026. Your customers already assume AI touched something. The Paladin move is to tell them what, instead of making them guess.

Ask me how I know. I needed a CPA for myself, so I had a voice agent call 20 local CPAs and bookkeepers to ask about their services. Very efficient! Very clever!

Here’s how that went. A bunch didn’t pick up. A bunch got voicemails. The ones who answered got a robot that didn’t say it was a robot unless somebody asked. (When they asked, it owned up. Small mercies.) And the more questions they asked, the less human it sounded.

Some of those calls turned into genuinely delightful conversations. Some turned into angry emails. Fair. I’d be annoyed too if a robot called my office and played person until I poked at it.

One of those emails put it better than I could:

When you have the option between being clever and being human, be fucking human.

Noted. So learn from my mistake: say when a robot is helping, before anyone has to ask.

We keep a public AI disclosure page for exactly this. You can do the same in an afternoon:

• List where AI is used in your work (drafting, research, transcription, whatever’s true).
• Say where a human reviews it before it ships.
• Say what you won’t do, like feeding client data into a tool you haven’t vetted.
• Put a date on it and revisit it when your tools change. They change a lot.

Only write what’s true on a given Tuesday. A disclosure page you can’t back up is just a fancier four-minute recording. And if you’re curious how AI tools describe you right now, there’s a five-minute self-check for that.

Net Result: Trust you didn’t have to buy. People forgive “we use AI for first drafts and a human signs off.” They don’t forgive finding out sideways.

Final thoughts: cite your sources

Every rule in this post that sounds like it came from a lawyer links to the people who wrote it. That’s the last Paladin habit, and the cheapest: when you say a thing is true, show your work. Link the source. If you can’t find one, say it’s your opinion and own it.

None of these tactics will get you a viral post. They’ll get you a business people don’t have to be suspicious of, which is a weirdly rare competitive advantage. Do the thing, write it down, and do it again next week.

Which boring virtue has quietly paid off for you? Tell me in the comments or send me a note. I’ll write back, and the estimated wait time is four minutes. I’ll actually make it four minutes.