People hire me because I work as hard for their business as they do.

I fell in love with writing at a science and technology magnet high school, of all places.

Three classes did it: cinematography—full production, scriptwriting through editing, a Spanish class where I had to write a full page every day even though I wasn't fluent yet, and a creative writing and poetry class. All three kept pointing to the same thing. It wasn't the filming or the editing I loved most. It was the story underneath it all. So when it came time to pick a major in college, I chose literature with an emphasis in creative writing. Between fiction and poetry, I chose poetry.

I didn't go straight into writing as a career. My brother had a business and needed help with his marketing copy. I jumped in, loved it, and was good at it. But I wasn't sure how to make a full career out of writing yet, so I started my own life insurance and securities business instead. I wanted to own something. And I used everything I knew as a writer to market myself while I did it.

A couple of years in, I realized I liked the marketing part more than the finance advice. So I took a corporate agency job, kept freelance clients running on the side the whole time, and eventually gave that side work a name—Copy by Marine.

What I do is marketing. The writing part of it—the words on your website, in your emails, in your ads. The strategy behind it—figuring out who you're talking to, what they need to hear, and how to reach them. The content side of it—helping you show up consistently on social media in a way that connects with your audience. And the consulting piece—sitting down with someone and telling them honestly what's working and what isn't.

Sometimes people need one of those things. Sometimes they need all of them.

The way I approach all of it goes back to poetry. I published a full collection, The Moon Taught Me, pulled from ten years of writing. Poetry is one of the hardest things to write well—you convey the most emotion with the least amount of words. And every word needs to earn its place. I write copy the same way. The comma placement matters as much as the sentence itself.

That same thinking is behind Marketing Without Performing—the book I wrote about why you don't have to put on a persona to market yourself. Talk about your business the way you'd explain it to someone you actually like. That's it. That's the whole philosophy.

The Moon Taught Me Marine's poetry collection—view on Amazon