Thanks for being a reader! 👋🏾 Every so often, I share a key personal career story which changed the way I thought about the workplace forever. 😈
If you like this entry, share some ❤️. Have any stories you’d like to share? Contact me at djoragui@gmail.com.
The Beginning
When looking back over 10 years, how I got started in marketing is fuzzy in my mind.
I have no formal education in this space. I didn’t get a mentor in the traditional sense until 3 years in.
So where on earth did I begin?
In January 2010, I don’t remember how, when or where I was - but I came across a well renowned forum (not necessarily for the right reasons), called The Warrior Forum.
Some of you who are old enough to remember, may know that the Warrior Forum back then was ‘a special place’ to find internet marketing education.
Education in the form of ‘info-products’.
This was a time before “digital marketing” was even a thing. At least in my mind.
Whilst the platform was littered with $X7 e-books; in short, opportunists who made money by teaching other people “how to make money online”, there were a few gems.
One of those gems, for me at least, was a product called “Blogging to the Bank.”
Now before you judge me, I was 18 years old, naive and had no idea what this all meant. The entire premise was spammy as fuck, but I was roped in.
I can’t remember the author’s name, but he had claimed to have built online businesses by just blogging.
I thought, “well I can do that. Might as well give it a shot.”
So I got my card out, paid the fee and never looked back.
This e-book taught me how to:
Niche down
Setup a WordPress website
Use an FTP client to update said WP content assets
Perform keyword research (which I absolutely hated doing)
Create valuable content to generate organic traffic
Distributing your content via “Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites”
Grow an email list
Nurture them and sell something
What I didn’t know, until years later, was that this was in fact Content Marketing as we know it today.
So I put it into motion…. 18 months later.
My Very First Marketing Project
In July 2011, I registered my very first domain name, configured my DNS records, installed a self-hosted Wordpress instance and was well on my way.
The name was djoragui.com, which eventually became The Balanced Narrative; an online publication dedicated to collecting real stories, opinions and conversations about subjects that matter.
Did I make any money with it?
Not directly.
But after reading the work of marketing leaders like Neil Patel, Brian Clark and Jeff Bullas who were killing it back then; I learned how to build an audience.
Over the course of a few short years, I achieved;
3,000+ emails collected
200+ articles
34 guest bloggers contributing to the magazine
And thus I proclaimed myself a content marketer.
What I didn’t know, was that I was already doing the work most content marketing teams were responsible for in their organisations.
And this was in a world before Zapier and workflow automations became a thing.
After all I was the strategist, writer, editor, promoter and optimiser of all this content.
But I had no idea how to monetise it.
Or rather, I did and it was virtually all set up.
It resulted in a membership program called The Balanced Life Academy. I had huge pre-sale interest (relatively) but I needed to pay my bills; like ASAP.
So I just closed it down and got a ‘real job’, without realising just how close I was to earning a living from it.
Ooops 🤭
About these career stories
This newsletter contains a series of stories which cover the full hire-to-fire pipeline of my experience in marketing and SaaS; from job interviews, working as a freelancer and consultant, in a team, as a founder and everything in between.
No stone will be left unturned and yes...there are names! 😈😜
If you liked this entry, share some ❤️. Want the tea before it spills ☕, connect with me on Linkedin or email me at djoragui@gmail.com ... there's no embargo 🤣