I wouldn’t call myself a guru in marketing.
However, I have spent more than 20 years working, reading, and learning in the marketing space. So I’d like to call myself a marketing expert.
Everything is marketing. Either you’re selling something to someone, or you are being sold. This is not only the case with products or services; it’s also the case with daily human communication. You might be busy convincing your spouse or neighbor about something, or they might be convincing or persuading you. All of this is marketing.
Communication is the way you say things. Marketing is the way you package it. Content is the structure of both.
Here’s how I first got interested in marketing:
In 1988, I started programming on the personal computer with GW-Basic, which is derived from the BASIC programming language developed by Microsoft. I started creating little games and so on.
Learning to code
Fast-forward a few years. When I was 15 years old, during college, I learned to code in C++, Turbo Pascal, ASP, and PHP. I wasn’t an excellent coder. I cared more about the result than the neatness of my code 😅.
I worked more with computers than people
Years went by, and working with code became more boring every day. I worked more with computers than people. So, I decided to learn more about marketing and sales. My main question was: “What causes people to buy the products that I make?” And boom, there you go—I started traveling the marketing and sales wormhole. That was in my 20s.
That wormhole has lasted for more than 24 years now.
Just starting out with marketing? Here are my lessons from 20 years of experience
Here are some tips if you’re just starting out with marketing. They will inspire you and guide you in building your audience so that you can sell things and live an epic life.
- Don’t start with paid ads first. First do some hand-to-hand combat with people and see whether you can help them individually. Hand-to-hand means going 1-to-1 by offering your service for free, with no strings attached. When you measure what works and what not, then you can scale and slowly start running paid ads
- Short is better. Lesson 1 in communication in marketing: skip the fluff. Get to the point and make it simple.
- Forget SEO first. Especially in this new golden AI era. When you’re just starting out with a new website, the main pitfall is that you are going to write, just to rank in the search engines. But guess what? Most of the content you write, already exists on other websites that have more legacy than yours. You have no distribution wheel. Start the conversation with the audience that is already reading. Start sharing your knowledge on social media. That one I’ve undervalued for 20 years. My presence could be stronger on social. So I’ll start investing.
- Start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey brought that one up a long time ago. When you start writing about subjects, start with the desired situation of the reader in mind. What do you want to achieve when the reader consumes your stuff?
