There is no shortage of bullsh*t in the marketing industry. And there is no shortage of people willing to peddle it under the guise of ‘thought leadership.’ However, the inconvenient truth about marketing is that while everything changes around us, human nature does not. And that’s who we’re selling to. Humans. So the fundamentals still, and always will apply:
Find a problem worth solving. Solve it. Tell people a story about how much better they’ll feel once you’ve solved the problem for them.
That’s it. That’s ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶w̶e̶e̶t marketing.
Unfortunately, that’s not great for your career as a ‘thought leader’…
Find your ‘lenses’ instead
Successful writers will advise you to ‘find your niche’ as a writer so that it’s easy for people to know what you’re all about. I get the reasoning behind this advice- the internet is a noisy place, and the audience doesn’t have the headspace to understand your multi-dimensional brilliance.
However, when you’re starting out as a writer, how do you balance ‘finding your niche’ with ‘optimizing too soon’? This ‘Atomic Essay’ from writer Jerine Nicole prompted me to think that I don’t want to become too predictable in the topics I cover, otherwise, my audience may start ignoring my work…
I’ve been trying to do this creator thing since September while holding a part-time job at a digital marketing agency, about 4 levels junior to what I was previously on. I’m doing this 4 days a week to pay the bills (just about) and then spending weekday mornings, Fridays, and Sundays working on my own thing.
I’m consulting on content marketing, SEO, and buyer psychology as my ‘side-hustle’. And I’ve also been writing on Medium, LinkedIn, and now on Twitter.
The hardest part about this has to be feeling like you’re the only one who hasn’t got it figured out…
I think we’re still trying to figure out how to value knowledge work as a society. Business owners and managers have a hard time knowing ‘how hard’ their staff is working. But they’re asking the wrong question.
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
-Cal Newport, Deep Work
I actually have sympathy for these business owners and managers. I don’t know how I would handle having employees who get paid…
I rose really fast in the first 5 years of my digital marketing career. I started out as an SEO (search engine optimization) Account Executive at a boutique digital marketing agency in London around 10 years ago. I was barely earning enough to cover my rent, utilities, transport, and food. But I worked hard and rose quickly up the ranks.
I averaged a promotion every 15 months for the first 5 years of my career. By year 5 I had got my break at one of the biggest agencies in the world and was heading up the SEO account for…
I’m a middle of the road kinda guy. I’m 5'8. I wear reasonably fashionable, medium-sized clothes. I had a middle-class upbringing. My father taught me the value of studying hard, finding a good job, and then working your way up the corporate ladder. So when a guy like me thinks that becoming a creator is a good career choice, you know something is changing in the world.
Like my male pattern baldness, it happened gradually, then all at once. Over the last 10 years, I had built up a very decent career as an executive in the digital marketing agency…
It’s a no-brainer for me
I’ve been watching the show ‘Marriage or Mortgage’ with my wife on Netflix and it’s made me realize what a huge mistake we made just over 4 years ago. We let ourselves get pressured by family to overspend on our wedding. If I could go back to 32-year-old me, here’s what I would tell him:
You’re just getting started in your career. You might feel like you should have ‘made it’ by now because you’ve had 8 promotions and have a ‘Head of’ in your job title. That doesn’t mean anything. …
Does anyone else’s brain go into full worst-case-scenario mode the moment anything remotely bad happens at work? I got super anxious due to a client emergency yesterday. I’ve slept on it- here’s what I think was going on, and how I’m going to deal with it.
Firstly, I need to recognize that my last corporate job did a real number on my mental health. I worked with a couple of weapons-grade narcissists who turned their own self-loathing into an all-out assault on their employees’ self-esteem. Their favorite technique? Gaslighting.
The gaslighter makes you question everything about yourself. Am I working…
As a creator, I think that’s the wrong question. It’s a classic sign of overthinking that plagues many intelligent people. So what’s a better question?
“What questions matter to people? And how well can I answer them?”
Do I have specific expertise in this domain? Have I had a personal experience that may be enlightening for people in a similar situation? Do I have a unique angle from which I can approach this subject?
OK stop. You’re overthinking again. Just create and let the market decide. It’s time to ‘get out of the building’ as they say in the Lean…
“You’re so lucky that you already know what you want to do in life”, she said as I told her I was going to be the no.1 golfer in the world. I was 15 years old and had just won my country’s national amateur championship. I couldn’t understand how anyone didn’t know what they wanted to do in life. I mean, you just do what you really want to do, right?
What a well-intentioned idiot I was.
I fell for the Nike I am Tiger Woods campaign. I believed in the idea that you must know your destiny in life…
Ali Q
Marketing Agency Survivor
