Hello world!
My name is Sal and I’m a writer, marketer, and former journalist.
At the time of writing, I currently work as the Sr. Content Marketing Manager for Embrace.io, a startup located in Culver City, CA.
As a content marketer, I have a lot of responsibilities. What used to be a position that many thought of as an in-house blogger, has quickly become the strategic hub of many digital marketing teams.
My day-to-day consists of building and managing our content calendar, providing strategic guidance for messaging, working with internal subject matter experts, leading SEO efforts, managing our CMS, and a ton of odds and ends that are both difficult to track and seemingly endless in number. Not to mention writing and editing on a daily basis.
While I’ve spent the last decade of my career in the marketing and startup worlds, it’s quite honestly the last place I thought I’d end up.
I went to school for, and began my career in journalism. First in Bergen County, NJ and then in Fairfield County, CT, I covered local news for both print and digital publications. I was an award-winning reporter who covered everything from gubernatorial rallies featuring former presidents, to illegal dumping on native grounds, to all of the boring municipal meetings that are vitally important to a well-informed electorate.
Although I loved everything about my time as a journalist, I did not like barely surviving paycheck to paycheck. Content marketing was a way out of that vicious cycle and I found out I’m pretty darn good at it along the way.
While I miss the days of shoe-leather reporting, I’ve done my best to hold on to who I was as a writer, a reporter, and as a journalist. And that early career experience in newsrooms has profoundly shaped who I am as a professional and as a content marketer, today.
I think a great example of that is in the way I’ve learned and deployed SEO. To many, SEO is a slur, and I don’t blame those who have a negative outlook on black-hat SEO.
And while SEO can and has been used to game search algorithms and has led to the enshifitication of Google SERPs, it does have its essential uses.
Anyone who writes anything for public consumption wants that content to be found and read. There are necessary tactics that have to be deployed to accomplish that. How one balances SEO and the quality of the content they produce says a lot about the values that person has as a publisher and as a marketer. My time as a journalist has led me to prioritize quality over SEO quantity. SEO is a tool, not the whole ball game.
But enough about what I do during my 9-5; let’s get to what I’m doing here.
For the last two years, my personal website has served as a digital writing archive. A place to save links to past work. But my intention has always been to expand this into a personal blog.
As someone who builds and deploys content strategies for a living, starting a personal blog would seem like no problem. But I’ve had plenty of hangups along the way.
For one, publishing a personal blog is scary. As a marketer, businesses love your creativity, but don’t always love your personal POV. Publishing on the topics I’m most passionate about—like world events, politics, and social commentary—can potentially close off future employment opportunities if read by the wrong person. As someone without a marketing degree and who therefore operates under constant imposter syndrome, that’s a pretty big boogeyman.
Beyond future work prospects, a bigger hangup is having intimate knowledge about content writing, publishing, and distribution. I know, from research and experience, that the best way to grow a publication is to focus on a single topic that you can establish your expertise in. I know that that topic should be something rather unique; not a subject where you’ll be fighting amongst hundreds or thousands of voices to be heard. I know that you need a niche.
Here’s the thing: That’s just not who I am. The reason I wanted to become a journalist isn’t because I wanted to become an expert on one, narrow subject. I could have stuck with academia for that.
No, I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to spend my time talking to experts. I wanted to spend my time exploring a myriad of topics. I wanted to not be bored!
I’ve recently had a few big losses and medical scares in my family. It’s made me pay closer attention to how much time I’m wasting scrolling social media, sitting on a couch, being passive.
Our time here is limited and it should be spent doing things that we love. I love to write. I also love a ton of different things: Sports (baseball, basketball, football, soccer), video games (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Switch), politics, world affairs, media criticism, travel, social commentary, the list goes on …
So rather than be afraid, rather than try to optimize for this metric or that, I’m just going to let go and create. Create content about the things and topics I care about, in the best way I know how.
I hope that you’ll come back and read my words again. Thanks for spending some time here!
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