The Exit

In 2022 I had walked away from my marketing role at MACkite. We had successfully built the largest online retail in the world but I was burned out. I took a couple years to work as a sales rep for Airush Kiteboarding. My winters were spent traveling around Florida getting intimate with the wind sport communities and locations.

Aaron stood out to me because he was building something. A real culture and community. We connected and formed a great alliance. Around 2024 he asked me to do marketing for him. This was the re-birth of my passion for my craft.

Some partnerships are transactional. This one wasn’t. It was two people who saw the same thing and decided to build it together.

The First Campaign: Own the Map

Our first campaign was a massive location guide. We both traveled to all the beaches in Florida to document the need-to-know details. We mapped out the most extensive travel guide in existence. For me this was a throwback to when I was working with Crystal Veness when we made a destinations kiteboarding video travel guide filmed in 13 countries. For Elite, we sequenced out the travel guide on his site with blogs, that we paired to their video campaign and it now functions as an interactive map. A gift from Aaron to all Florida kiteboarders. 

This wasn’t content marketing. It was infrastructure. The kind that compounds.

The Authority That Already Existed

We also focused on basics. My bread and butter has always been beginner-focused questions. You help people getting into the sport for four years and you’ve effectively trained a generation of instructors and local heroes to see you as the authority. I’m yet to visit a country or airport and not have a random kiter shake my hand to tell me they learned everything about the sport from my content over the last decade.

That’s the asset. Not a logo. Not a media kit. A decade of trust baked into the community. Google evaluates the entity before the page now.

My decade of experience paired with Aaron’s gives the system confidence in our content. This is what most don’t understand. Google is tracking our actions over time, and it has a permanent memory.

You build trust over time. You demonstrate authority over time with analog sweat and digital receipts. You feed the AI information with site structure and MesoCluster campaigns.

We use Answer Engine Research (AER) to produce the best content. In this case, the research came from my time and Aaron’s time in the field, testing the products in the conditions and locations we wrote about.

This is not easily replicated without real analog work. Megan Timmer from our team spends countless hours reviewing Aaron’s content to ensure we structure his voice and ideas back with my own on products. We use competitive analysis to ensure we provide the most complete and helpful answer. This is how you build information architecture and decision architecture while mapping pages to intent.