Field Note / Jacqueline Waters
The Website Was a Sold Sign. Now I’m Building on the Property.
A claimed domain can do an honest job as a marker. Eventually, though, the property needs rooms behind the doors.
I have to laugh when I look at the first version of OutloudMarketer.com, because it was basically a sold sign stuck in the front yard.
Property claimed. Name secured. This belongs to Black Cat Media. Everybody keep moving—there is nothing to tour yet.
And honestly? That was fine.
The website did exactly what I needed it to do at the time. It put the name somewhere real. It showed that OutloudMarketer was connected to the other Black Cat Media properties. It gave the domain a legitimate public presence while I was still figuring out what, exactly, I wanted to build behind it.
It was not a failed website. It was a marker.
But you cannot leave the sold sign in the yard forever and call it a house.
OutloudMarketer has started becoming something much more useful than the original page suggests. We have a public Instagram account. We have researched and produced real campaigns. We have tested tools, made mistakes, corrected bad assumptions, documented what happened, and accumulated more unpublished material than I realized was sitting around waiting to be used.
There are opinions in that work. There are stories in it. There are practical things another business owner could use. There are also a few lessons I would have preferred to learn without paying for them first—but since I already did, somebody may as well benefit.
That is the website I want now.
I want OutloudMarketer to sound like a person who is actually doing the work, because I am. I want to talk about the decisions we are making inside Black Cat Media, the campaigns we are building, the marketing materials we are creating, and the tools that genuinely help.
Some of those tools will involve AI. Some will not.
Choosing the right domain is a marketing decision. Deciding whether a piece of software is worth buying is a marketing decision. Building an email list, creating a product page, testing a social channel, making an infographic, and figuring out why a perfectly good tool was purchased six months too early are all part of the same real-world work.
That is much more interesting to me than becoming another account that breathlessly announces that AI changed everything again before breakfast.
Instagram can carry the carousel. LinkedIn can carry the business lesson. Facebook can carry the conversation. Pinterest can carry the infographic. But the full article—the context, the receipts, the mistakes, and what I actually think about all of it—should live somewhere we own.
There will eventually be one focused page for resources, useful downloads, recommended tools, affiliate links, and things we have to sell. One page. Not the whole personality of the website.
I do not want OutloudMarketer.com to feel like somebody tackled you at the front door and demanded your email address before you were allowed to look around.
The rest of the site has to earn the click.
That is why I am not rushing to replace the homepage with another shiny landing page surrounded by empty navigation. We are going through what we already have, finding the pieces with something real to say, and turning them into editorials, field notes, guides, campaigns, and the occasional news briefing when we can add more than a rewritten headline.
When the new homepage arrives, there should already be rooms behind the doors.
The original page still belongs in the story. I am not embarrassed by it, and I am not pretending it was meant to be the final version. It did its job. It marked the property while I figured out what belonged there.
Now I know.
OutloudMarketer is becoming the public marketing voice of Black Cat Media: part publication, part working notebook, part campaign engine, and yes, eventually, part money bucket.
The sold sign can stay in the scrapbook.
I’m ready to start building the house.
Keep following the property
The rooms are being built in public.
Behind the work
Jacqueline & Kate
Jacqueline did the work and formed the point of view. Kate helps make it visible.
OutloudMarketer documents the decisions, experiments, failures, and useful conclusions behind what Black Cat Media is building.
No Lies. No Stealing.
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