Podcast Daniel Gordon   Daniel Gordon is the founder of a content marketing organization that helps brands that truly cares about their audience in building a relationship with their customer. He believes that by helping them to make an effort to inform, educate, equip, engage, and inspire their customers they’d create a community of customers or clientele. I further explain the peeks of content marketing and how it involves providing anything that is just basically written, like articles, email, newsletters, social media posts, case studies, e-books, videos, brochures or things of that nature. He basically explains that business that engages in content marketing boils down to them thinking like a marketer, in terms of just going after it, care about the experience you're creating, build relationships, treat people well, connect people and thus not just thinking like a brand but becoming. Because by using the resources you're given and the success you’ve earned to keep feeding the machine and separating yourself from the pack]   [00:01:49] Hi, I'm Suzanne Lynn and welcome to the Brooklyn made show. Now you may have heard the term content marketing being thrown around and you kind of wonder what it is, maybe you summarize. that it could mean sharing information about your business or organization you would mostly be right, but it's actually about so much more than that, it's really a way to have a voice and a conversation with people around the world digitally but there's no point in me going on about it because we've got a real expert, His name is Daniel Gordon and he's doing some tremendous things for his clients in the content marketing arena. So let's dive right in. All right, well Daniel I'm going to start out with what exactly content marketing is? I mean when I think about content marketing is like this gigantic universe of information and I don't exactly know what your world, you're part of that is.  [00:02:43] Yeah, yeah it's truly vast and nebulous, so content marketing boils down to truly caring about your audience and building a relationship with them. So it's making the same effort to inform, educate equip, engage, and inspire that you do to sell. So the way you do that tactically is by creating online content around your products and services. So I think articles, email, newsletters, social media posts, case studies, e-books, videos, brochures, things of that nature. You'll find varying definitions of what's considered content marketing and overlapping terms like Inbound Marketing, digital marketing, that's content used for online marketing, you can go ahead and call it Content Marketing, don't worry about it. Even your traditional marketing collateral like sell sheets and flyers can be repackaged or repurpose for content marketing. [00:03:42] Because it's got the information but it's the way you're presenting it to people that it's content marketing? [00:03:47] Exactly. [00:03:38] I got it, I got it. So what is the foundation of your business? Is it based on heavy blogs or web design, as a client what would I be coming to you for? [00:04:05] Basically anything written, so again all those things I mentioned, they all have one thing in common which is written content. So if it's… I'd naturally get a lot of business for Blogs because that's really the foundation of it all and the web site concept and e-mail blasts and we'll probably get into how these things intertwine and bounce off of other as we go through the conversations.  [00:04:34] I would love that because I really want to understand more but I've got a good idea of what it is that you're doing. I want to how did you get into this and how are you able to turn probably something as a good writer that you enjoy doing into a business. [00:04:47] Yeah-yeah I had to sell out a little. [00:04:50]This is juicy stuff, turn the radio up, that's right. [00:04:58] Yeah-yeah, so my background is in journalism and I always grew up writing when I was little all I cared about was writing and basketball. It’s all I wanted to do, I actually started… like around high school I started writing songs, which led me to a brief stint in the music industry, I was managing producers and songwriters, trying to get my own stuff noticed of course but that never quite hit as a career, definitely wasn't going to be prosperous. So I got a job in marketing as a copywriter, from there I took right to it ended up moving onto a marketing agency and I couldn't get enough of it, so I started taking freelance work on the side.  My 1st marketing job was actually still a client to this day about 6 years later. Yeah-yeah, it is hopefully a testament to how I do things and I at least believe that. So eventually I had enough freelance work to think I might be able to approach my salary that I had at the marketing agency which wasn't very high, so I took the leap it was very calculated, methodical, strategic, I talked to my family, talked to mentors they all supported him believed, so I knew the demand for writing was really high too, thanks to content marketing and the timing was right, so I was ready to go all in. [00:06:25] Were you scared? [00:06:28] Not necessarily scared, I think it's a huge risk right here, putting your life on the line in a sense again I thought I had everything in place and all you can really do is try to put yourself in a position to succeed and put something valuable out into the world and I thought I had that and that was really all there was to it. [00:06:55] So basically you just tried to mitigate you know how bad worst case scenario can be but you know what I love about this and I'm getting so excited is hearing you bet on yourself, you didn't stay in a job that you felt like well I'm always going to need the security of a paycheck and you know I just bloom as much as I can under someone else, you went for it. [00:07:19] That makes me so happy that you said that phrase because I tell people all the time you know really what a lot of these decisions come down to for life in business is betting on yourself and the way I put it is if I’m going to bet on myself every day, so what am I even doing? so not necessarily a coincidence that you phrase it that way, love it. [00:07:42] I just love, that’s amazing. Ok so I want to talk more about the positive things but is there anything that you struggle with as a freelancer? Is there any advice you've got OK we know to mitigate worst case scenario prepare yourself and I love the fact that you say you had mentors, you didn't just try to do this on your own you were very strategic and tactical. What is one piece of advice that you would give people that maybe you didn't see coming? [00:08:13] I think all the things that you're going to expect to be challenges, all the things that you read on you know article and managing your time and getting clients and running the books and all that those aren't going to be the things that become challenges. It really boils down to just running like a business and for me honestly, I've been fortunate, the biggest challenge has been managing growth and making sure I'm getting new clients and you know taking care of people who I have while I'm at it. I'll tell you a little story that kind of puts this in perspective in terms of just like go, keep going and don't worry about all the things that you think are going to be challenged. So when I said leaving my job was calculated, part of that was I had been generating freelance leads for weeks and months prior, so my 1st day as a freelancer, I woke up I started checking my email in bed as we all do nowadays, first thing when we open our eyes.  I was laying there and the 1st thing I see now is my 1st-day freelancing, so the sun comes up is an email saying thank you for your interest in such and such we regret to inform you that you don't get this gig, it was a huge company. And a gig that I was thinking I was going to get and be like wow, I’m really hitting the ground running here, I didn't and luckily that wasn't the trend and one of the few times that's happened but the reason I tell that story is to put it in perspective like just you can't let anyone single thing build and turn into a big thing, you just have to have that mentality where you keep going and nothing's going to stop you.  [00:10:11] You know the day is going to end and there's going to be a new day a new opportunity. [00:10:18] Yeah, I love telling that story. [00:10:20] So I want to know how can a smaller mid-sized business build a content strategy you know said to come to us like Daniel, we have a lot of information, we just don't know how to get it out there, how can we partner? [00:10:36] Yes, that’s a good question. So 1st you need to have a brand strategy. So you need to know who you are, who you're not, who are your audiences, who they're, not what your tone of voice is, what it's not and all of that. So a little bit of soul searching and the reason is that your brand identity helps you understand what type of content you want to create. So if my audience is very professional and my voice is sincere, I'm not going to be on Facebook posting my morning latte art or whatever coffee I've got, I'm probably going to be on LinkedIn posting my morning motivation and some snippet of business advice. [00:11:18] So you have to be consistent with who you are?  [00:11:22] Yeah-yeah, otherwise you're just going to go with whatever the buzz is or whatever someone is in your ear about. So you really start with that, like I said soul searching. Once you have that budget obviously becomes a factor right, so the good news is you don't have to spend stupid money and you definitely don't need to spend it on software or tools, this is a concept marketing is a human thing, humans talking to humans. So where a lot of people go wrong with budgeting is like I kind of mentioned spending it all in one area from a business owner and I see Instagram has all the buzz, it's all I see or hear an