Southern Tide Media Sample article

This is a sample with illustrative content. The business below is fictional and every name, price and number in it is invented to show the format — any resemblance to a real company is coincidence. It shows what a piece looks like when it publishes, and, underneath, the trail that produced it. It is not a case study and it is not evidence of a result.

A Sample Piece, and How It Was Made

Written for: Pelican Point Outfitters (fictional example) · two-post cadence at $495/mo · published September 2026

The piece, as it published

pelicanpointoutfitters.com · /blog/sit-on-top-or-sit-inside/ · 1,180 words · 6 min read

Sit-on-top or sit-inside? How to pick your first kayak

By the Pelican Point team · Reviewed by Dana Whitfield, shop manager · Updated 12 September 2026

Most first-time buyers in our shop are deciding between a sit-on-top and a sit-inside. Here is how to tell which one you want, in about two minutes. If you are paddling warm coastal water, launching off a beach, and you want to be able to get back on after a swim, buy a sit-on-top. If you are paddling cooler water, covering distance, or you want to stay dry, buy a sit-inside.

That is the whole answer, and for about eight out of ten people who walk in here it is the right one. The rest of this page is for the other two — and for anyone who wants to understand why, so the boat still makes sense in three years.

The practical difference

A sit-on-top is a sealed hull you sit on top of. Water drains straight through scupper holes, you can slide off it and climb back on in deep water, and there is nothing to bail. A sit-inside puts you in a cockpit, which is drier, warmer and more efficient — but if it swamps, you are emptying a boat, and learning to do that in open water is a skill rather than an instinct.

	Sit-on-top	Sit-inside
Getting back on after a swim	Easy, unassisted	A learned skill
Staying dry	You will get wet	Mostly dry
Cool-weather paddling	Uncomfortable below about 65°F	Comfortable with a spray skirt
Distance and speed	Slower per stroke	More efficient
Fishing and photography	Better — open deck, easy to move	Restrictive

What we actually stock, and what it costs

We keep fourteen hulls between $480 and $2,400, and we will talk you out of the expensive one if the cheaper one suits how you actually paddle. The single most common mistake we see is someone buying for the trip they imagine taking once a year instead of the trip they will take twenty times.

A lighter hull is easier to carry down to the water, which for most of our customers matters more than anything it does once it is floating. The boat you can lift onto the car by yourself is the boat you will use.

Before you go out

Federal rules require a wearable life jacket on board for every person, and children under 13 must wear one while under way on most vessels. We fit them here, free, whether or not you bought the boat from us.

Source: U.S. Coast Guard life jacket requirements — linked in the published piece.

Still not sure?

Come and sit in both. We keep a demo of each on the rack by the door, and the inlet is fifty yards away. Ten minutes on the water settles it faster than any article, including this one.

Note the shape of the piece, because it is deliberate: the answer is in the first paragraph rather than the last, the comparison is a table an AI engine can lift a single row from, every factual claim is attributable, and the things only this shop knows — fourteen hulls, $480 to $2,400, a demo by the door, free fittings — are the parts a model could never have written. That is what makes it rank and what makes it get cited, and it is the same work either way.

How this piece was made

22 minof the client’s time — one call answering the questions only the shop could answer

4factual claims checked before publication. One was cut, one was corrected

$295the published per-post price, or $495 a month for two. No word-count menu

Step	Who	What actually happened	Status
Topic chosen	Us	Picked from the questions the shop answers most in person, cross-checked against what already ranks for them. Not from a keyword dump	Done
Brief and outline	AI, reviewed	Research pass and a structure; editor cut two sections that existed only to hit a word count	Done
Client input call	Client	22 minutes: inventory, price range, the demo boats, what customers get wrong. This is the part that cannot be automated	Done
First draft	AI	Full draft in the shop’s voice from the brief plus the call notes	Done
Editorial pass	Editor	Opening rewritten to answer in the first line; generic paragraphs replaced with the shop’s own facts; one unsourced statistic removed entirely	Done
Fact check	Editor	Four claims checked against sources, not against the draft. Log below	Done
Structured for search and AI answers	Us	Answer-first opening, comparison table, clean headings, schema alignment, source links	Done
Photography still outstanding	Client	The demo-rack photo would replace the stock image at the top — published without it rather than holding the piece	With you

The fact-check log

Claim	Verdict	What we did	Status
“90% of paddlers prefer a lighter hull for coastal touring”	Unsourced	No source located. Cut, rather than softened into a vaguer version of the same unsupported claim	Cut
Guided-tour tide window	Wrong	Draft said 90 minutes; the shop’s own schedule says two hours. Corrected against the schedule	Fixed
Hull inventory count and price range	Verified	Checked against the shop’s live inventory the morning it published	Verified
Life-jacket requirement	Verified	Checked against the current U.S. Coast Guard requirement and linked in the piece	Verified

The first row is here on purpose. A fact-check log in which everything checks out is a trophy, not a process — and the claim that gets cut is usually the most quotable-sounding sentence in the draft, which is exactly why it needs cutting. You get this log with every piece.

What it cost, honestly

One piece, researched, human-edited and fact-checked$295
Or two pieces a month, with the calendar and the AI-answer optimization$495
Your time22 min
Stock imagery used in this example$0

For comparison, and because nobody in this category publishes it next to their own number: in August 2026 one well-ranked agency published $150–$600 per blog post and another published $1,500–$6,000, on pages three weeks apart. Retainer floors in the same review ran from $2,000 to $8,000 a month. Those are real published prices, and the gap between them is scope rather than quality — which is the question to ask any quote, including ours.

What we would not claim

That this piece will rank. Nobody can promise that, and we would be careful with anyone who does.
That AI wrote it or that a human wrote it — both are half true, and the split is in the table above.
That two posts a month is a benchmark. The industry’s most-quoted cadence statistic comes from a 2015 dataset that its own publisher has since removed from the page. Two is where we start, and we will tell you when your site wants more or wants refreshes instead.
That this sample is a result. It shows the format of the deliverable. Ask separately to see work in the wild, and treat any supplier’s mockup the same way.

Every AI Content engagement works this way, with the edit trail and the fact-check log attached to each piece. The content is yours — on your site, in your hands, and it leaves with you if we ever part ways. Month-to-month with 30 days’ notice after any initial term.

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