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Becoming a successful freelancer with Liam Carnahan
179 Plays2 years ago
Well, well, well. Look who’s back. Us.
Welcome to Content People’s Season 2 kick-off!
In our first episode of the season, we sit down with Liam Carnahan: A successful freelancer, owner of Inkwell Content, and a très respected name in SEO and content creation.
Liam’s a fantastic guest. He shares the challenges and rewards of freelancing and provides actionable advice for anyone who has dreamed of living that freelance lifestyle.
We talk about:
- The exact moment that Liam knew that freelancing was the right choice for him.
- How he built up his brand - and a business - through LinkedIn.
- The importance of staying calm during Content “Emergencies.”
- Why Liam is so passionate about educating, mentoring, and supporting other freelancers.
Want to know more about Liam?
- Explore his website here.
- Hit him up or follow his professional journey through his LinkedIn profile here.
- For a detailed look at some of his indispensable advice for freelance writers, be sure to check out his advice at this link.
We hope you like the episode. If you do: Please rate, review, and subscribe. ⭐
And sign up for our newsletter, Content People, here: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Content People Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi and welcome to content people. I'm your host Meredith Farley. I'm a former chief product officer turned chief operating officer turned CEO and founder.
00:00:14
Speaker
My agency is called Medbury. At Medbury, we work with founders, execs, and companies who want to tell their stories and grow. But Content People is not about me or Medbury. It's about the creative leaders and professionals that we interview every week. We'll delve into their journeys, unpack their insights, and ask them for practical advice. If you like it, please rate and subscribe. I really hope that you enjoy. Let's get started.
Meet Liam Carnahan: SEO Specialist and Coach
00:00:40
Speaker
All right, so Liam, for folks who don't know you, can you introduce yourself and what you do? Sure. I am Liam Carnahan. I am an SEO specialist. I do SEO content strategy and content creation and just general consulting for clients. And I also am a coach for freelancers and a freelancer myself. So that's the two sentence who I am.
00:01:01
Speaker
I feel like you left out an important part of your identity, which is that you're my friend. And I am your close personal friend of so many over a decade, almost 15 years. Yeah.
00:01:13
Speaker
Kind of scary. It is. We met in Content
Journey from Content Marketing to Friendship
00:01:16
Speaker
Marketing. So thanks Content Marketing for bringing us together. Truly. And thank you for being so influential so early in my career because I think when I started at Braxton, there was what, maybe five to eight employees total. Something like that. You were one of them and happened to be my manager. We sat right next to each other and who knew that it was absolute fate bringing us together and that
00:01:38
Speaker
Here we are in our mid 30s and still talking about content. I know. I wonder if you went back and told us that. I don't know how thrilled we would have been. I think we might have been like, wait, what? Yeah, I think shock would have been the thing. But I think not surprised about the friendship part. I think surprised that we're both still in this industry and still plugging away at it. Yeah. In very different ways.
The Role of Psychology in Writing and SEO
00:02:02
Speaker
Definitely. All right. Well, so if you weren't in marketing,
00:02:06
Speaker
What do you think you'd be doing? We're in marketing. What would I be doing? Is trophy has been an option.
00:02:11
Speaker
It's a fantastic question. I think that take a lot of work, it's a dream. It's one that's achievable. You could throw that in there as an option. Okay. Well, that would be option number one. But if that doesn't count, I mean, I love what I do, to be honest, I've kind of built the career that I wanted for myself, just out of personal requirements. So much of what I do really does make that I think something I would try differently. I almost went to school for psychology.
00:02:37
Speaker
I didn't know that. Yeah, I was this close and my creative writing teacher talked me out of it and was like, go for writing instead. She's like, that's where the money is. He, but... Sorry, sorry. He was like, yeah, yeah, go get the big bucks in creative writing. Well, turns out he was actually writing. That's true, yeah. But I almost became a therapist. It's kind of in my family's genetics to do that kind of thing. And I love the human mind. I love learning and asking questions and being creative.
00:03:04
Speaker
I knew that career would mean less writing. And so I went the other way because writing gets both psychology and my passion for words in one place. That is really interesting. So I'm very excited to dig into for listeners more about what you do and how you've built this awesome life and career for yourself. And I feel like the psychology does come into play so much for copywriting, content writing.
00:03:34
Speaker
And also a bit just in some management, client relations, work life. No, you're so right. I think something I often say when people are like, they're kind of surprised that I love to do keyword research all these years later. And it looks so tedious and boring from the outside. Yeah. But I love it because to me, keyword research is like opening up the brains of millions of people and like
00:04:00
Speaker
What are people curious about? What are they worried about? What are they anxious about? What are they hoping for? You can divine that from keyword research. And to me, that's the most interesting part. And I love when you're doing keyword research and you come across some weird phrase that has like 3,000 searches a month or some weird anxiety that you're like, should I be anxious about this? Because another 5,000 people a month are googling. Those little moments of psychology truly make this job worthwhile for me.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yes. Okay. That makes so much sense. And it's kind of, I imagine too, it's a bit, it's the alchemy that you bring to it. It's not just data. It's not just, this is the title. It's the why and the people and the perceptions of the readers behind it. That's so important too. Yeah. So much of SEO is taking data and then putting a human story on top of it and very much psychology.
00:04:46
Speaker
That is pretty much when you go to therapy, you are uploading data about your past and your experience. And this professional is looking at that and thinking, this is why you behave the way you do now. Same principles apply to SEO. If you can believe it or not, I'm looking at all this hard data for my clients and saying, OK, this is what your customers are worried about, what they're thinking about. And this is what they want us to tell them. And we're going to do that.
Founding Inkwell Content and Financial Insights
00:05:12
Speaker
What inspired you to start Inkwell Content? So as you know, we both started out in agency land and I think you were far better suited for it than me. I was a little bit like a rat in the cage from early on and just never really saw myself as the kind of person who would go into
00:05:33
Speaker
an office nine to five. I never even really wanted to work in marketing as kind of happened. But I stayed in agency lands for a long time because that was really the only option. Yeah. Back in the day. And you were great at it just to interject, which I feel like is a lot of people in agency land as
00:05:48
Speaker
You might not love it, but you've got a special set of skills. There was something about it that did work out because I, you know, not to brag, but I did pretty well for myself. I ended up going abroad and starting up our office in Sydney and not starting it up, but, you know, working there as it was starting up. A seminal member. And then becoming, eventually became content director at another agency.
00:06:10
Speaker
And that is honestly the moment when I decided to start my business. It was almost a week after I got the best promotion of my life up to content director. And I got a huge raise. And to my employer's detriment, I also got access to the numbers, specifically how much my content team of one was pulling in for the business. And I looked at that number and realized how much bigger it was than the number that I was getting in my bank account. Yeah.
00:06:38
Speaker
And I thought, geez, I'm doing 100% of the work and seeing like 30% of the profit. That doesn't make any sense. And at that job, I also worked with a ton of freelancers. That's how we made a lot of our content. So I knew all these folks who were like,
00:06:51
Speaker
doing what I wanted to do. And this was back in 2018, 2019. One day I had this one conversation with a freelancer friend of mine and I told him, I was like, I really want to do this, but I'm so scared. And his name is Nick, he's amazing. And he said, freelancing is like walking into a dark stairwell. You don't know how far down the first step is until you take the step and then you realize it's not that far. And after that, you can kind of run down the stairs.
00:07:19
Speaker
And that just spoke to me. So the very next day I put in my notice and started building up my business while I was serving my three month leave notice. And by the time I had quit, I'd already found a couple clients and had my website up and running by the time my contract was over.
00:07:38
Speaker
And from that point forward, I thought, I'm going to make this business exactly what I want it to be, because I've spent the last 15 years making other people's businesses what they wanted it to be. Now it's my turn. I love that story. And I love that you, as I've talked to you about starting my own business and had moments of like excitement and then deep anxiety, you told me that story about the stairs. And it's such a powerful, wonderful visual. And I love it so much.
00:08:07
Speaker
I know that I kind of want to talk about your course a little bit because I know you've launched this new course that is about supporting freelancers who need to learn about how do you build a business? How do you set things up? So would you talk about that a little bit?
SEO Bridge Builders Course Introduction
00:08:24
Speaker
Sure. The course is called SEO Bridge Builders. And the reason I call it that is because I started on this freelance journey in 2019. So this was really before the pandemic. And of course, you know, six months later, everyone else was working remotely too. But I
00:08:41
Speaker
Kind of had to fumble around the first year and fortunately working in agencies, you know, as much as I will trash talk agencies whenever given a chance, I picked up so many important skills there from you and from all of my managers and my colleagues about client management and
00:08:56
Speaker
You know, I was even doing things like building keyword research templates for myself and content calendar templates. Actually, the very first content calendar template I ever built was for Brafton for my writers there. And now that's like something I'm selling because I realized that over the 15 years while I was working in agencies,
00:09:14
Speaker
I just built up all these processes and methods for finding SEO clients and selling to them and convincing them that it was worthwhile and working faster and delivering high quality results. And I realized I was sitting on all this stuff that I'd made for myself and that other people really wanted to be SEO freelancers and they had SEO training.
00:09:35
Speaker
And that was available is readily available. I mean, I have a free SEO course that teaches the fundamentals in an hour. You don't need to go to school to study SEO. And there are courses that teach about freelancing too, but there aren't any that really teach you how to take your SEO knowledge and then cross the gap over into becoming a high earning freelancer. And that's where I came up with the idea of a bridge builder. Because I was like, what people really need is they need to upskill on SEO, which they can do without me. They don't need my help.
00:10:02
Speaker
But once they're there, they need someone to build a bridge to how do I take that knowledge and actually make decent income and not just work for $50 on Fiverr. Yeah. So I wanted to show people that because I love my life as a freelancer. I think more people should enjoy this kind of a lifestyle. And it's my passion to like help people do that. And so this was a way for me to do that. That's what the course is all about.
00:10:26
Speaker
It's interesting how so much of the work you did over that time, not with the intention of building something like this, but it all went toward it. And then pursuant to showing other folks how to do something that you're so passionate about, I know you're such an advocate for the freelance lifestyle.
00:10:41
Speaker
Absolutely. And yeah, it was kind of a wake up call for me. I'm a huge fan of mentorship. And one of my mentors kind of shook me and was like, you're sitting on gold here. Like you've made all this stuff. Like if you just keep it to yourself, not only is that selfish, but you're also kind of flushing money down the toilet. So, you know, release this stuff, make it public, make it available. That's the lesson.
00:11:02
Speaker
No one should have to do it in 15 years. Yeah. My course takes like you could do it in a weekend, no problem. Wow. And it doesn't teach you everything I learned in 15 years, but it teaches you the bulk of it. And so I don't want people to spend 15 years behind a desk like I did. I want them to start tomorrow. Yeah. Well, I mean, you've talked to so many.
00:11:23
Speaker
freelancers in your mentorship of them. What do you think holds people back from taking the leap into freelancing? The unknown.
Overcoming Freelancer Fears
00:11:31
Speaker
I don't know where am I going to find my clients? What if I don't make enough money? What if I fail? What if I fall? I mean, I felt those things. I've never met someone who's thinking about freelancing, who isn't experiencing those kinds of anxieties. And it's true, right? You don't know where your next paycheck is going to come to when you're a newbie freelancer.
00:11:52
Speaker
And there's something to be said for a steady paycheck and steady income. And a lot of people, that's preferable. Yeah. But some people who don't want to have to serve another company, if you can find the ways to do it and find the discipline to do it effectively, save yourself a lot of time and earn more money in my experience. Yeah, I think that's really powerful. So if someone's interested and they want to
00:12:17
Speaker
Like check out your course or check out your resources. Where would you send them? So I have like, look, I love to get stuff away for free to be honest. So much so that like some of my colleagues have had to talk me out of it, but most of my like really good stuff is free and you can get it on my website, inkwellcontent.com slash resources. That's like all of my templates and tools and stuff that I'm giving away for freebies. There's also info about the course all over my site.
00:12:44
Speaker
And you can just visit me on LinkedIn. I don't really shut up about it as well as join my mailing lists. Okay. I want to talk about LinkedIn a little bit for a second because you are so good at LinkedIn and from some combos that we've had, I know you've gotten a fair number of your clients from LinkedIn. The majority. All right. What are the questions I want to ask about this? Like a lot of people admire what you've done for yourself on LinkedIn.
00:13:08
Speaker
how have you done it?
Leveraging LinkedIn for Success
00:13:10
Speaker
Like, what's your approach? What advice do you have for folks who maybe are starting a freelance and they're like, all right, I know I need to be on the platform, but it's overwhelming. And when I try, I'm not really getting much engagement. So what's the point? Okay, good questions. So I started on LinkedIn completely by accident. I really always resisted that platform. I always thought it was messy place. It's messy.
00:13:34
Speaker
And, you know, when you're working full time, like, what's the point of having a LinkedIn? You know, I only ever updated my LinkedIn when I was looking for a new job. And that changed when I was a freelancer and I started to hear from other freelancers. I may call my money off of LinkedIn. And I was like, what? I'm barely active on there. And it's like stuffy and, you know, people are just bragging about themselves and I don't want to be part of that. Yeah. Well, I was wrong. First to say it. My friend, Jacob McMillan, who's like the man on SEO copywriting.
00:14:01
Speaker
he convinced me to just give it a go and try 30 days of posting. He said, just try posting every day for 30 days and just see what happens. So he shared this list of prompts with me and I started to do it. And it didn't happen instantly, but I realized that first of all, the algorithm loves when you do that, when you post every day. And I started to realize that the things that really performed on LinkedIn
00:14:28
Speaker
were not me bragging about my services or actually even talking about my services. I very rarely mention my own services on LinkedIn. Interesting. Instead, I just share things that I know, my perspective, my how to do this.
00:14:43
Speaker
anything from like, here's the 20 questions I asked at the start of a technical SEO audit to yesterday I posted about, here's what I do when I really f up with a client. I saw that one. I thought it was great. Yeah, thank you so much. And so those are not really promoting anything. They're just promoting me being someone who knows stuff about certain topics. And once I got into the groove of that and realized like,
00:15:07
Speaker
know, I'm a teacher at heart and I love to be educating myself and educating others. When I realized that my best LinkedIn posts were the ones that were truly educational and helpful, I got really good at it. And suddenly I started to get a lot more engagement. My followers started to go like crazy. I started to get DMs of people being like, oh, I've been following you and I love what you're doing. And I'm just wondering, like, could you help me answer this SEO question? And then
00:15:30
Speaker
Next thing you know, those are my long-term clients. Wow. So it was a matter of persistence, a matter of understanding what the algorithm wanted and getting over my biases about it and just doing it. Yeah. I love what you put out on LinkedIn. I think it's so useful and valuable. And I think that increasingly having a personal brand, even for folks who do have a day job is important.
00:15:58
Speaker
Because I think finding a way to articulate who you are to the marketplace, it's not the same freedom as being a freelancer, but it's the freedom of a safety net or of getting a steady stream of potential outreach from jobs or prospective employers, et cetera.
00:16:18
Speaker
But I do think that people find it so difficult and complicated to not feel cringy about putting stuff out there, especially before you figure it out and you're not really getting that many likes. It can be another experience.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yes, deeply embarrassing. I'll be like, I got seven likes, someone come kill me and put me out of my misery. Like it is that bit is really tricky. And so I don't know what to say about it, except that like, I think you've done a beautiful job with it. I think that's all good advice. I have empathy for the folks who are trying. I hear you. And let me just say a few things. So first of all, today, three years into marketing myself on LinkedIn, 80% of my posts. So
00:17:03
Speaker
Keep that in mind when you're like, nothing's going well. And you're like, it's probably because I'm new and I'm never going to get good at this wrong. Well, true. You are never going to get to the point where every single post gets a thousand comments and goes viral. That's never going to happen. The algorithm won't let you unless you're like one of the one percenters. So just let that dream go. OK, the second thing is that's great advice. I'm already feeling comforted and calm as you speak. We call them vanity metrics for a reason. Likes and comments actually, from my experience,
00:17:32
Speaker
have no correlation to getting leads off of LinkedIn. I am, as you know, a little bit obsessive about tracking things, keeping track of, I track where all of my leads come from, like from, you know, where was the first point of contact. The people who have turned into the most successful long-term high paying clients are people who never commented on a single post, never liked a single post, just randomly DM'd me,
00:17:58
Speaker
And then like, I've been following you for six months and I love everything you post. I'm like, well, thanks for never commenting or liking, but those are the people who turn into clients. So just because a post got seen by seven people and two likes from one, from your mom, like it doesn't matter. Are you looking at my wisdom, ma'am? I'm your mom in that case.
00:18:17
Speaker
No, I think it doesn't matter because the right person might have seen that. And it's about consistency. There's not going to be one post that gets you every single lead. It's going to be you or that person showing up every day on LinkedIn talking about the same thing over and over so that when that person thinks, hey, I really do need someone to help me with X. And I remember reading that really awesome post about it. Who was that guy? Oh, yeah, I'm going to go DM him. That's how it works. So you have to be consistent.
00:18:45
Speaker
That is fantastic advice. And I remember once I said to you something, we were like hanging out and I was like, oh, I'm so embarrassed. This didn't really go as well as I thought it was like a post. And you were like, my posts get like seven likes all the time. And I was like, I never see posts of yours that only get seven likes. And you're like, that's the point. And I feel like there's something about the algorithm that's really interesting in that way is that you see only the most successful content of other people. It's very rare that you
00:19:15
Speaker
You see the mediocre vanity metric performance post of others, so it's easy to go in and have the feeling of everyone else is so much more well-liked than me. But that's the algorithm. That's not the reality. Right. LinkedIn is still social media, and it's still designed to keep you on the platform and kind of make you feel crappy about yourself. Good job, LinkedIn. Right. So you need to remember, people don't see the failures.
00:19:41
Speaker
And to be honest, I always say LinkedIn is very much like, it's a testing zone, right? You go in there, you see what resonates with your audience. It's how you build your personal brand. Oh, my audience like ate this up when I use this specific metaphor. So that's going to become part of my personal brand. Whereas this thing that I talked about, nobody gave crap. So I'm not going to put that into my marketing plan or whatever. So you have to be willing to test things out and LinkedIn is the place to do it. And if it flops, probably nobody saw it.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's the beauty. That's the flip side, the sunny side of the algorithm is that that is really interesting. I also feel like, I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but like for me personally, like every morning I do these little like almost like a written like prayer mantra thing. And one of them is, I actually stole this from Russell Brand, who polarizing figure, but I love this advice from him. Yeah. And one thing he says every morning is like, I pray to not live in the perspective of others.
00:20:37
Speaker
And that to me has always really resonated because I think it can be easy to see yourself through other people's eyes in a way that makes you feel bad or complicated about something.
00:20:46
Speaker
And I feel like LinkedIn has been great for me in that, because I'm like, all right, I might feel embarrassed if this doesn't perform the way I want. But it's a testing ground. It's not about what other people think. It's about figuring out what works. That's the great mentality. And I have another very similar mantra that my music teacher said to me, which is you compare, you despair. I probably said that to you before. And it really resonates with me. I kind of catch myself being like, well, I don't know. So-and-so got 2,000 likes on their post, and I only got 10. That's not really helpful, because who knows whether that person
00:21:15
Speaker
paid to get those many likes or maybe that was their first time ever going viral. You never know what's going on with other people. You can never actually find out, so just spread it out yourself. Yeah, and I think that I really appreciate all the advice you have on LinkedIn because in particular, I would say that for freelancers who are maybe just starting out or anyone who's in a transitional moment where they're like, all right, I need to leverage this stuff to get clients.
00:21:41
Speaker
You're already in a vulnerable state and then in a vulnerable state, launching into potential cringe inducing incidents on a social platform can really put you in
00:21:53
Speaker
a negative headspace. And so I feel like your guidance on it is always so calming and helpful. Do you have it? Are there any resources that you could direct people towards if they're like, Liam, how can I do you have notes for me? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked. So I have a couple things people can use. So on my resources page, or just on my blog, there's my most popular blog, it's a guide to LinkedIn for freelancers. And it
00:22:18
Speaker
talks through the algorithms, so like the little things that you can do to like kind of make the LinkedIn algorithm happy. It shows examples of posts that have done really, really well from myself and from my people I admire on LinkedIn and kind of breaks down why that post worked well. And then the thing that I added recently was I mentioned that I got started by posting on LinkedIn every day for 30 days and I use these prompts. Yeah.
00:22:42
Speaker
Folks who were offering that prompt, unfortunately, took it down. I don't know what happened. The website's just not live anymore. So I made my own. I went through and picked out 30 posts that performed really well for me, my brand, and got me leads. And I turned them into prompts for writers to use. And so you could download this. You can even, if you're a total nerd like me, you can track.
00:23:02
Speaker
how many followers you have after each one in the same spreadsheet, if you want to, or you can just use the prompts. It's just to give you, a lot of people sit down, they're like, I don't know what to write today. Well, you just open this up, grab one of the ideas I put in there. And if you do that, if you do it consistently and you do the things I say on there, it will happen for you. You will get a following if you do the things I mentioned. It's almost guaranteed. I love that. All right. So those are the things to do, right? Where do you think people go wrong with their personal branding?
00:23:28
Speaker
I suppose specifically on LinkedIn, but outside of LinkedIn, if you have thoughts on that as well. I don't know.
Authenticity in Personal Branding
00:23:34
Speaker
I mean, I think there's a therapy theme in here. Right. But if you any talk with me, right. I think if you don't approach personal branding like a form of therapy, then you're not doing it right.
00:23:46
Speaker
I totally agree with this. I totally agree. Sorry. Keep going. Because if you really want to do the work in therapy or in personal branding, you have to be completely willing to look at yourself pretty hard. And that is right. Right. It's really scary. No more. It's so scary and painful and vulnerable and confusing and
00:24:05
Speaker
frustrating to look at yourself in a really honest way and that's why people go to therapy because it's a lot easier when you have a mentor to kind of bounce ideas around and in personal branding is the same thing. If you try to make a personal brand and you don't really understand who you are at your core or you do understand who you are at your core and you're embarrassed about it and you're ashamed of it and you're not proud of it, you don't know, you can't say these are the things that I
00:24:30
Speaker
effing love about myself. If you can't say that, then your personal phrase is bound to flop. Because if you can't say it, then there's no way you're going to convince your audience that it's true. So you have to be willing to look at yourself and say,
00:24:44
Speaker
I love this about myself and this is what makes me worth paying. This makes me a worthwhile human and this is why I deserve to live a happy life and why I deserve to get paid to live a happy life. And that's what the key is. So I see a lot of people who are like, they make a personal brand around who they want to be or who they wish they were or who they think they should be. Interesting. And it's a fake brand and you can kind of smell it. Yeah.
00:25:09
Speaker
Whereas when someone is like, here is me on the page, here's my heart and here's who I am and the things are maybe not great about me and the things are really good about me. Honestly, those are people who make money. That's really, really powerful.
00:25:22
Speaker
And I can give an example on that. This is an example that I use my website. You know, when I got so excited that I was building my brand and my website is hot pink and black, which is something that none of my former companies would have ever tolerated a hot pink color. And there's rainbows and emojis. And I talk about being gay and queer. And I talk about, you know, having worked for brands that are related in the sex industry and that kind of stuff.
00:25:48
Speaker
All of that is my personal brand and it serves two purposes. First of all, it's me on the page. So I'm allowing myself to really be vulnerable and honest about who I am. At the same time,
00:25:59
Speaker
I'm warding off anybody who's not going to vibe with me because that's the beauty of working for yourself. The beauty of being a freelancer and having a personal brand. You are in the driver's seat. Very rare that you get to do that in your work. So you need to be putting out signals of these are the kinds of people I want to work with. These are the kinds of people I don't want to work with. And you use your personal brand as a magnet to either draw the right people in or push the wrong people away.
00:26:23
Speaker
For me, those are homophobes, right? Don't have time to remember anybody homophobic because there's no way I'm going back in the closet. I can't. I don't fit anymore. And so, you know, but whatever that is for you, you know, I also try to drive talks to people away with my branding by being brutally honest about what I do and don't tolerate. Take control of your brand like that and you will see success.
00:26:43
Speaker
I think that's such good advice and it aligns to with advice like I've heard, which is that when, whether you're a freelancer or you're just starting out a new business, like who your first few clients are is very important. And if you just take the clients that don't feel like a fit, but you're like, I just need that little paycheck right now that if you can hold off, you'll be in a really try to work with your target demo and ideal client.
00:27:08
Speaker
you're going to be building the business in the direction you want it to go. And I feel like the branding you're talking about to kind of ward off the folks you're not interested in working with is really setting yourself up for success in that way. Yeah. Look, I think everybody when you're a newbie freelancer, you are going to take on crappy jobs. I did it and you know, sometimes you need
00:27:29
Speaker
something in your portfolio more than you need a paycheck or often and the idea is to get away from that as fast as possible.
Advice for Young Marketers on Mentorship and Freelancing
00:27:37
Speaker
And the way that you do that is by building a personal brand so that you don't have to go out and accept every job that comes your way. But instead the people who are like, that's a hot brand. I want to be part of that are coming to you being like, take my money.
00:27:49
Speaker
That's the dream. It takes time to get there, but you have to start building your personal brand early on and be honest with it or else you'll never get that. You'll just always be hunting for clients, which is exhausting. Yeah. And kind of as you're talking, one thing I'm thinking about a little bit too is I'm curious for your thoughts on this, but sometimes like the type of branding you're talking about
00:28:10
Speaker
there are moments where maybe I've had times where I'm like, I want to post something about this, usually something kind of feminist or I'm like, this is some gender bias bullshit. But I've maybe actually held back because I've thought, I don't know, I'm not trying to alienate anyone online. I'm not trying to, maybe I'm a little just like overheated about XYZ. And I actually think that in line with some of the things you're suggesting that talking about the way gender bias impacts women at work online,
00:28:40
Speaker
is not something to ever shy away from for me because I don't want to work with sexist people. Yeah. Everyone to work with someone who was offended by a feminist post. Right. Like no. So when you think of it in that direction, it's helpful. But I do think that maybe the generation before us, like our parents generation was so much more separation of church and state when it came to values and work that for me, at least I think it was really kind of ingrained like
00:29:05
Speaker
You just don't want to ruffle feathers when it comes to like people's political views at work. Especially when you work for a company and you represent a company, right? But here's the thing, like the working world in the last three years has fractured in a massive way. Everyone has become more independent. Even if you still work for a company, odds are you did it remotely. Maybe you still are doing it remotely.
00:29:28
Speaker
So we are much more, when it comes to work, individualistic society. Which means, that's a wonderful thing in my opinion because it means you really don't have to be this little drone who is like, I stick to the corporate line and I tow the line for my company. You can now go out there and be like, this is who I am, this is what I do, this is what I'm passionate about and I want to make money off of that.
00:29:49
Speaker
That's beautiful to me. I'm so happy that, you know, the one good thing that came out of the pandemic in my opinion was that it gave people more autonomy. Yeah. And that don't pass that opportunity. I've used that to build something. What do you think the best
00:30:04
Speaker
marketing or career advice you've ever gotten? Oh, my God. It's very hard to say. I have a series of mentors that I think about, you know, from you being the first one, actually, from my grown up job. Thank you. Who have given me really good advice. And it's very hard for me to remember who gave which piece of advice over 15 years. I used to have this boss who had this sign behind her desk that said, bring solutions with your problems.
00:30:31
Speaker
And when I was 22, I hated that sign. I hated my boss for it. I was like, that's the most obnoxious thing. Like, why? There's a problem and I don't know how to solve it. You're my boss. That's what this is for. Well, reflecting on that, truly, if you want to be a successful freelancer, I think that's the best advice I've ever gotten because your job as a freelancer, if you're in the client services of any type, is to make life easier for your client.
00:30:56
Speaker
It took me a very long time to figure that out. That's really what they're paying for. They're not paying for my 15 years of SEO experience. They're not paying for my degree in literature. They're paying because I can walk into their life and say, all that stress you're feeling about getting more people to your website or getting your content up and running, or you don't have to worry about it anymore, because I'm going to take care of it for you. And you don't ever have to chase me. I'm not that kind of freelancer. I'm holding your hand and doing this stuff for you. That is why people are paying.
00:31:25
Speaker
My shoulders just like dropped as you were speaking. It's really coming. That is what I want to be close to. Again, to go back to therapy. When people walk into my quote unquote office, I want them to feel relaxed because when they're relaxed, their wallet opens. And not to be capitalistic about it, but that's why I'm here, right? And so to me, the idea of bringing solutions to your problems, that's really what it is. If something goes wrong with a client, if a client is having a problem,
00:31:51
Speaker
And you can come to them and say, I got the perfect solution and I'm already on it. Yeah. Ching baby. Yeah. So to me, that's the best. The other thing I would say is I once had someone say to me, there's no such thing as a marketing emergency. And that is so true. People get so worked up about content marketing and SEO.
00:32:13
Speaker
The truth is we're not saving lives here. We're not working in ambulances or fire departments or hospitals. So if you publish a typo and you're chill about it, you're going to do a lot better than if that kind of thing goes into a meltdown because you can't really solve problems when you're in meltdown mode. So you've got to be chill about these kinds of things. Don't freak out, keep a leveled head, find the solution, and then bring that solution to your client. That's how you make money.
00:32:41
Speaker
I was reading earlier before you came over. I'm reading The Mindful Athlete. Have you ever heard of it? No. I actually think you'd really like it. You know how I feel about athletes. I knew. I'm like, it's not, it's basically mindfulness. I feel like I think I've talked to you about Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, which is like Rick Rubin's kind of manifesto about creativity. And I feel like this is really just the other side of that same coin. It's really about mindfulness and finding flow. It's a fantastic book.
00:33:10
Speaker
But sorry, what I'm getting to is that actually I underlined a section earlier this morning that I feel like really is in line with what you said, which was that a positive mindset.
00:33:19
Speaker
improves your cognitive capacity. And the ability to just like stay positive and calm no matter what is actually going to lead to better outcomes. And I feel like at work for me and I think for you, that's been a bit of our superpowers at times is like, just stay calm, stay positive, you will figure it out. And you don't have to feel guilty for taking that approach because you're actually through that approach going to achieve a better solution too. Yes, yes. I think panic,
00:33:49
Speaker
is a monkey brain response, right? Yes. Have you read this book, Liam? You've read this book already. I wrote it actually. That's my other name. No, no, I didn't write it. I'm sure that person is much smarter than me, but to me it's like panic.
00:34:01
Speaker
You know, it serves you well if a lion is like outside ready to eat you. You know, you do want to, your heart racing, you want to run and you want to scream and get everything. But when you accidentally sent an email that wasn't supposed to go out with that subject line, panic does not serve you in that moment. It only makes you anxious and unable to think and makes you want to cry and get defensive and nothing that's actually going to solve the problem. If you can just take a breath and be like, okay, this happened. It's not the end of the world.
00:34:30
Speaker
then you become one of those brands that sends a really funny follow-up email to be like, oops, we made a mistake and here's a little funny joke. And you can actually strengthen the relationship that you have with your customers or your clients after a mistake, if you can keep a level head about it. Yeah.
00:34:47
Speaker
All right. Well, I know we're kind of like, we're getting closer on time and there's so much of your advice that I'd like to mine, I guess. So I was going to ask what advice you'd give to younger folks who are interested in marketing and just starting out in their careers. So, and particularly, I guess I'm curious, say someone's like 22 and what you're saying is really resonating with them, but they might feel
00:35:09
Speaker
I'm curious for how you'd advise them because on one hand, I think anyone can figure out whatever they want. And if a 22 year old was like, I want to be a freelancer for my career, they can do that. But I also think kind of a foundation of like the knowledge that you do learn in a professional environment for a little bit, you can really leverage in a freelance career later. How would you guide someone who's 22 or like what you're saying, the autonomy is appealing to me. I don't have a ton of experience. What do you think I should do?
00:35:39
Speaker
Well, the first thing I would say is I'm so proud of you. And I think whoever you are, the fact that you're thinking that way is so remarkable and good for you. And don't let it get you down that you feel uncertain or unsure or lack confidence because everybody who's your age and most people who are much older than you feel that way.
00:36:00
Speaker
But if we got all the sappy stuff out of the way, I would say congratulations. You're born into a generation that does not need to actually go the long route of working in an office. There's a lot more resources out there for you. And it is a huge, huge community of freelancers and independent workers out there.
00:36:19
Speaker
do not be afraid to approach. We are all lonely, honestly. We work alone. We spend time alone. We don't see people very often. So my advice was I was a little afraid to reach out to the freelance community. I thought, oh, they're all so much more professional than me. It's kind of like looking at the cool kids at school and being like, I'm afraid to talk to them. They're going to make fun of me. No, we're not. We're like starved for conversation.
00:36:41
Speaker
Honestly, if you DM me on LinkedIn, you're going to get all my stuff for free just because I'm dying to talk to people. So join, there are Slack channels, there are Facebook groups, there are LinkedIn groups, there are probably some apps that the cool kids are using that I'm not even aware of that can introduce you to other freelancers. Reddit, honestly, is a huge freelance community I'm there to.
00:37:03
Speaker
So go and ask people your questions. Introduce yourself. Don't be afraid. Let other people guide you. Find a mentor, because that is actually the fastest track to success. I think that's really good advice. And I wasn't sure where you're going to go with it. I can see you being like, do two years in agency. Figure it out. No. I think that's really OK. Yeah, absolutely not. Oh my god. No, run. That was a full body note from you. Do that if you want to. Like, if that's your vibe. Like, I know people who love agency life, and it's their thing. It's not for me.
00:37:33
Speaker
And if you've been listening to this and think, gosh, I wish I was doing what he did, I really don't think you need to do that. I don't even think you need a degree. I think you can train yourself in a lot of ways. There's lots of free training content out there. And I think you can get yourself there with a combination of training, free and paid if you want, and mentorship. And again, free or paid if you want. There are free mentors out there.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah, mentors just like cheat code. Mentors are cheat code. Absolutely. I know. I know. So, well, do you want to talk about AI or are you sick of talking
How Will AI Reshape the Content Industry?
00:38:09
Speaker
about AI? I mean, I love talking about AI. I'm so afraid of it. I know. Yeah, like, obviously for content in particular right now, I feel like AI is the first frontier of
00:38:20
Speaker
We might take some jobs and do this a little bit better. Do you have a sense of or what's your prediction for maybe in the next 12 to 18 months, how AI might
00:38:29
Speaker
impact the content and SEO space. Sorry. No, no, no. I have such mixed feelings about it because I use AI a lot and I really enjoy it sometimes and I love having a little bit of an assistant. Or just some company sometimes. What do you think about this paragraph? I think we are in the iPhone one zone of this technology and who knows what it will look like when we're at the iPhone 10, whatever it is now.
00:38:52
Speaker
I would say it's gonna happen baby it's coming so the people who are gonna win out are the people who allow it to happen I mean like as much as I would love to be like oh god and like not look at it yeah that's not gonna serve me very well because I will definitely be one of ones left behind yeah I think if I were a young person right now
00:39:13
Speaker
I would be studying it intensely. And I would also be practicing my job as an editor. I think that AI is maybe going to give editors a renaissance. And I think that having the ability to take AI generated content and add that human flair.
00:39:30
Speaker
is going to be a really valuable role. And I think if you can then add on, I'm like a prompt wizard as well. I write really good AI prompts and I massage them. I think that can be a valuable skill going forward because people are not going to have to hide the fact that they're using AI much longer. We're going to be open about it. People are going to be looking for people who know how to use it well. That being said, technology is going to get better.
00:39:54
Speaker
I don't know how good it will get. I guess the other thing I would say is start fighting for universal basic income everybody because the robots are coming for our jobs and we got to find a way to support ourselves here. Yeah. So, you know, go fight the good fight. All right. Vote for Elizabeth Warren. You know, she lives around here. I know. Let's go find her. Bring her on the pod. She's about a mile away. Oh my God.
00:40:23
Speaker
next week's guest, Elizabeth, former presidential candidate. That was Meredith falling and having a panic attack.
00:40:32
Speaker
All right. Well, is there anything else I forgot to ask about or anything else that you'd kind of like to plug or point people toward
Connect with Liam Carnahan
00:40:37
Speaker
before we? No, I would just say if you really want to interact with me, the one thing I would recommend you do is just go sign up for my mailing list. So go on my website. There'll be popups that you can't miss or, you know, just on my LinkedIn anywhere you'll see it. But all my best advice goes into my mailing list. So if you just want the goods and nothing else, that's your place. And come say hello. I'm super friendly. Can confirm great email content. Thank you.
00:40:59
Speaker
All right, Liam, thank you so much. Thank you, Meredith. Oh, my gosh, so much fun. All right, folks, I hope that you enjoyed that episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe or review us. And if you want to check out our newsletter, Content People, it is in the show notes. See you next time. Bye.