Journal

A Year In Review: 2022 Was Surprisingly a Great Year

January 9, 2023 by Jonathan Gaby

With the end of one calendar year and the beginning of a new year undoubtedly we’ve read and heard lots of people review their years and set new intentions, goals, or dare I even say resolutions ahead of the new year.

I want to put my own spin on the genre and simply offer and share with you how 2022 became a most surprising and actually really great year for me, and offer a few tips to you who might want to set for yourself intentions, resolutions, or goals.

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If You Want to Blog Better, Get Marketing Calendar, by CoSchedule

August 11, 2022 by Jonathan Gaby

Building my business is really hard work. One of my biggest pain points for me is writing great content on this blog and promoting that content to my audience, social media subscribers, and my email list. For me, I’ve been using Evernote in a process to create and publish blog post articles, but I still have problems promoting the posts on social media. So, I am adding CoSchedule to my workflow for content creation and marketing.

For me, the reasons are clear. I needed a way to integrate my process in Evernote with my blog built on WordPress. Further, I needed to add features like ReQueue so that older posts and those with more evergreen flavor could be added and promoted without my direct involvement.

What else did I find helpful? Read on for my review of CoSchedule.

Podcast Production: Three Must Haves for your Studio

March 18, 2022 by Jonathan Gaby

Podcasting is the latest content type that marketers and content creators are heading towards in the internet space. A podcast not a new medium though, but it seems that with the popularity of such shows like The Joe Rogan Experience podcasting has taken a bit of a lead in the various types of content.

Picture of a podcast production studio with four microphones and a Rodcaster Pro — Photo by **Harry Cunningham @harry.digital** from **Pexels**

As a podcaster myself, I have produced various shows. I’ve produced and podfaded a podcast for conservative politics in my state, a marketing podcast, but now, I have relaunched a podcast called Marketing Distilled. As a result, I’m writing this post about the three things every podcaster should have when they launch their podcast.

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Five Components of a Healthy Brand: A Primer for the Small Business

January 15, 2022 by Jonathan Gaby

Branding is all the rage on the internet. It’s almost ubiquitous and understood that businesses need and are a brand. Now, many people are working hard in an effort to create personal brand. It’s almost incessant.

With all the talk about branding these days I think it’s necessary to understand what a brand is and to define the components of what makes up a brand. This post will share with you the five components of a brand and how those work as a whole.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Big Picture Marketing Framework: A Crash Course

September 14, 2021 by Jonathan Gaby

Marketing is crucial to the survival of any business or firm. A business must be able to establish brand awareness and sales of their product or service to make sales, drive revenue growth and stay in business. There is almost a plethora of approaches to marketing that many businesses attempt.

This image contains the framework for Marketing Management: The Big Picture — The Big Picture Framework

With so many frameworks and approaches to marketing, it’s dizzyingly complex and the right framework must be chosen in order to do the right job. As part of my graduate studies, I’m taking Marketing Strategy, with Drew Boyd at the University of Cincinnati. We are studying Marketing Management: The Big Picture. This post will be a crash course in what I’ve learned so far.

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Top Five Reasons I’m Using Nimble for My Job Search

August 19, 2021 by Jonathan Gaby

What is one of the most daunting and demanding things an adult gets to do in their life? Some of the aspects of adulting include buying a home, raising children, or purchasing a car. Right now, I’m facing one of the most daunting things of my life, and that is a job search. The job search is a process that has many, many moving parts and I need a tool to help me manage the job search. Enter Nimble, a CRM that I have found to help me in my search.

A picture of a man at a computer looking at his phone using Nimble CRM for his job search. — Photo by **Vlada Karpovich** from **Pexels**

What exactly is a CRM? A CRM stands for customer relationship manager. This is a tool that most people in sales and marketing roles are familiar with, because they have been and use a similar tool to make sales, grow a business, and increase something in their career. You can use the same system for a job search. After all, a job search is very similar to a sales. In this post, I’ll share with you my top five reasons you should also be using Nimble for your job search.

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Crash Course In Email Marketing

March 17, 2021 by Jonathan Gaby

The goal of any business or cause, especially ones with a mission or a message, need to grow their email list. Yes, there is social media and online advertising, but those methods are largely dependent on algorithms, and now the whims of founders and developers who might not agree with the message or the mission of the organization. An email list and a thriving email marketing strategy and campaigns, will always trump the efforts of someone who utilizes social media exclusively. Email marketing is a straight line from the message or mission to the audience or activist. There is no middle man.
How does one start and grow their email list and begin to see the benefits of email marketing? There are really three steps to get started.

Sign up for an email marketing system service
Create an opt-in to attract subscribers
Develop a welcome sequence
Develop a consistent calendar to engage and keep engaged your list

Sign up for an email marketing system serviceThis is very simple. Go to MailChimp.com and sign up for a free account to get started. You’ll get the tools you need to start growing your email list for free up to 2,000 email addresses.
Create an opt-in to attract subscribersAn email address is an increasingly personal piece of information. We use email addresses every day to sign up for things, get emails from others, and create a conduit for communication. But, it’s the goal of the mission or message to get the address of the website visitor. To do this marketers create opt-ins or a reason for someone to give their email address in exchange for a piece of content.
What makes an opt-in great? It depends. You could create a checklist in pdf form, a white paper for a business case, a chapter of a book if you’re a writer, a series of videos if you’re a speaker, or even a few songs if you’re a singer or musician.
The nitty gritty comes in where you need to place that opt in in a prominent place to advertise on your site and include a pop up form or some form of lead page to your site to get people’s attention.
Develop a welcome sequenceThe next step is to develop a welcome sequence or some sort of an onboarding sequence. This could be a series of emails that are sent over a period of time to further introduce you to your new email subscriber, further develop your message, or ask them to take a series of actions. It’s really up to you what this might look like.
Commit to a regular calendar of emailsAfter you have developed your opt-in and are collecting emails, you now need to create a calendar for emails you will send. These emails could be blog posts you’ve created, products you want to sell, news you want to share, podcast episodes, or anything else you want to promote to them.
The key here is to keep your list engaged and make sure that your list is hearing from you.