So Carrie suggested I take HubSpot’s inbound marketing certification course, and that helped me learn my CTAs from my CTRs. In my previous life, my only goal had been to bring readers through the door-what happened to them after they got there was someone else’s problem. But I still had to learn what content marketing was specifically. As desperate as I was, I would have accepted much less.Ĭarrie hired me because I had a proven track record of creating entertaining online content and growing blog traffic, and I immediately got to work doing that at my new job. Mark put me in touch with the wonderful Carrie Gallagher, who hired me to be Credibly’s Content Marketing Manager, at a salary above what I was making at the mixed martial arts blog, which felt like winning the lottery. “Ben,” he said, “you’re an experienced writer and editor, you’ve managed freelancers, you’ve managed social channels, you already have the skills for this kind of work.” Having no better options, I trusted him. What rescued me was something called “content marketing.” which I’d never heard of until a recruiter named Mark Peznowski suggested I look into it. But you know that feeling where your wife is at her new part-time job and your son is away at pre-school, and you lie down on the floor of your home office because you don’t know what else to do with yourself, and it certainly feels a lot nicer being down there on the floor than it does sitting on the couch sending out another resume and cover letter to a media company that won’t hire you because you don’t live in New York or LA? Whatever you want to call that state of being, that’s where I was. I don’t know if I was depressed, necessarily. This period of my life lasted about six months. The staff and students at the gym provided a great source of emotional and social support, even if financially it was just a small step up from being unemployed. To supplement my meager freelancing income, I began taking front desk shifts at the MMA gym in Ann Arbor where I had been teaching cardio kickboxing classes in my spare time. The publishing world had changed for the worse since the last time I’d been out of work, and I now found myself as a 33-year-old husband and father, hunting for entertainment blogging assignments that paid $40/article, and applying for full-time editing gigs that would barely cover my mortgage. I’ll just say that when they stop inviting you to the holiday party, you should start to get your affairs in order.) (*By “unexpectedly laid off,” I mean that there were a ton of very obvious signals that my website’s new parent company was about to fire me as part of a larger “pivot to video,” but I ignored all those signals, choosing instead to pretend that it would never happen. I remember my dad telling me, “Someday, you’ll look back at this moment as one of the best things that ever happened to you,” and I thought, What the hell are you talking about, how could something that feels this awful be a good thing? So you can imagine how I felt when I was unexpectedly* laid off in January 2015, just two months after my wife and I bought our first house. Who else would pay me that much to do something I generally enjoyed? A better situation was almost inconceivable. By the end of my tenure at the blog, my salary was about $85,000/year. I learned to develop the talents of other writers, something I found to be incredibly rewarding. I worked from home which meant my dog wouldn’t be alone all day, and I occasionally got to travel around the country and watch fights from cageside and meet interesting and dangerous people. To be fair, the job had its share of perks. Let me tell you about the last time I got fired:įrom October 2007 to December 2014, I managed a mixed martial arts blog that I won’t name here, because it’s been almost completely scrubbed from the internet by this point.Įven though I was starting to lose my passion for the work after about five years on the job-how many times can you can watch a guy kick another guy in the head before the abyss stares back into you, so to speak-I stuck it out because I figured that this was going to be as good as it got for me, professionally.
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