Media is about attention. And if you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss a lot and drop the ball and you may think that you can never find it again.
In 2014, I dropped out of a lifelong career in freelance journalist because I could see newspapers and magazines losing viability because old school advertising was being consumer by social media and content marketing and I didn’t think they were skills I wanted to learn, nor that I could. I was a journalist, not a marketer, but a decade has passed and I now understand that I am a storyteller and that it matters little if my clients are publications ruled by journalism’s guidelines or if they businesses looking to use stories about their products and services to help consumers solve problems.
In other words, I have embraced marketing. But what do I know about marketing? And so as I have in the past written long form features for newspapers and magazines about business and technology and art, I am now working on a “Content Marketing Deep Dive” to catch a glimpse of what I’ve missed and to see if I can find new opportunities for myself in the new storytelling marketing landscape.
I’ve decided to put together this blog to keep track of my progress and to share with others what I learn. While I did blogs in the past I never monetized them or spent a lot of time on promoting them, they were well read for their markets and that’s was what mattered to me, but this time around, I’m hoping to learn how others make a living from blogging and see if I can monetize a few things too.
I think ultimately what I missed in failing to embrace what was going on in media was that missed the truism that there are simply millions of possibilities making money doing what we love, and that rather than disrupting and destroying people’s livelihoods as many have experienced with what has gone with the Internet, that amidst the disruption and in the aftermath, we are all finding new ways to forge our futures with the skills we have an the technologies once unfathomable and now at our fingertips everyday.
Wish me luck. I believe I’m going to discover that what I thought wasn’t something I wanted to do or could do is likely to be something I always to do. Well hop in, and join me as we find out.