Since December 2020 I’ve been learning the Thai language. While I’m no where near proficient yet, I’m at the point where I can have some conversations beyond ordering food at restaurants with people who don’t speak English.

If we assume Thai is similarly difficult to English, then this Preply diagram based on the EU language levels suggests perhaps I’m at A2, though I manage to stretch the limited vocab I have to around B1:

Anyway, I’m writing this before I get too deep in my journey and let another 5 years pass without reflection. I want to do a quick recap of my journey so far in case anyone wanted some ideas on how to go about learning Thai themselves.

Here’s my learning journey recap:

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1. Motivations

Everyone has their reasons. These are mine:

• Survival. Accidents and fights happen (verbal). I’d like to know enough Thai to be able to handle myself when things go wrong, without someone needing someone to speak on my behalf. Also helps that you can’t get tricked so easily if you know what people are talking about.
• Making friends. Learning Thai would help with making Thai friends.
• Competition. An odd one but motivating. In 2017 when I got to Korea, many of my close friends started learning with me around the same level. 4 of them, out of the group of 5 including me, reached TOPIK6 level in Korean, the highest. 2 of them even ended up on TV. Somehow, I didn’t want this to happen to me again in Thailand with the Thai language.
• The anti-goal of not becoming a frustrated, angry old farang. I’ve always had this in my mind to NOT become some kind of creepy uncle that scares kids at weddings, stuck in an unintegrated, low-achievement farang bubble. Withering away in a Pattaya go-go bar…

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2. Timeline

Here’s a recap timeline of how my learning journey went.

2020

• Started learning the language from knowing nothing about it.
• Bought a starter pack from Tutoroo (link). The learning was super inefficient and ineffective but let’s count it anyway. I paid 750 THB per 1.5 hours lesson, 2 lessons upfront. Renewed maybe 2-3 times? So I guess that’s 9 hours.

2021-2022

• Basically gave up on Thai for the most of 2021.
• But in December 2021 I enrolled with Rapid Learn Thai online (link), buying 2 rounds of 10k THB at 500 THB a lesson. 40 hours.

2023

• Felt a renewed focus on learning Thai.

• Did 200 days of daily study, before breakfast while exercising. Probably the minimum effort on Memrise which I think is 15 minutes. 200 x 15 minutes / 60 = 50 hours.
• At some point, I was reviewing vocab on the train on the way to work. I’m guessing I did this for about 3 months, each workday. 20 work days a month x 3 months x 10 minutes = 10 hours.

2024

• Made a routine to study about 30 mins every morning with breakfast, each work day. I assume I missed about 1 day per week by being sloppy. 12 weeks x 4 days x 0.5 hours = 24 hours.
• Spent 6,745 THB for 20 lessons, 1 hr each. 20 hours.
  • I assume I spent at least 30 minutes study per hour with the tutor. Yes I’m a lazy student. 10 hours.
• ⭐ This is when my Thai really improved. I changed my technique to just speaking with my tutor for 1 hour about anything, using English only for words or expressions I didn’t know. Any words I didn’t know were written down for study later.

2025

• Bought a book, Complete Thai Beginner to Intermediate Course (link). Bought to see if it can fill in the gaps of my learning to date. But unsure if this will work yet.
• 4 dedicated study sessions in Jan/Feb (ugh, too few). Approx 30 minutes study time. 2 hours.
• Not yet in the habit of studying vocab on the way to work again, but probably done this 2x at 10 minutes each. 20 minutes.

Total stud time: approximately 165.3 hours.*

*Obviously doesn’t include passive time spent listing to Thai being spoken around me while being in Thailand.

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3. Learnings

In the early stages, a structured introduction class would have been a more efficient way to learn the base layer of the language.

From the start I knew I couldn’t commit to a class based on my experiences learning Mandarin and Korean. My location and schedule often changes and unfortunately I tend to get sick often and easily. So studying only with tutors was my way to make learning flexible.

Sadly, this turned out to be one of the major things that made my learning time less efficient. Many tutors lacked a robust beginner learning process which would have been super helpful to get started. We’d cover a few key phrases but it didn’t feel like it went smoothly or properly built upon each other. It was more like going through a Lonely Planet guide of key phrases.

While I got through the total beginners stage eventually, it could have been faster. I still couldn’t have done it via a class, but maybe you can.

Learning reading early is a strong learning multiplier. But it’s just a multiplier, not a replacement for learning vocabulary and grammar.

In my early lessons with my tutor, I really felt like I wanted to learn more reading and writing as went.

I was worried I’d make the same mistake as I did with Mandarin, where I was guided to learn speaking and listening first – and would eventually come around to reading and writing later. That was a big mistake because while I could speak and understand (to approximately HSK 1.5 level), it was less useful because I couldn’t read basic signs in the Subway, restaurants or other places in daily life. Which sucked.

Having known that, I saw Rapid Learn Thai recommended in some Facebook group as a way to learn reading and writing first so I enrolled.

Gary Orman, the creator of the Rapid Method, makes several good arguments for learning reading first, too:

1. You can understand tones, so you speak more properly
2. You can read common words and naturally acquire more vocabulary

Looking back, I’ve found these 3 points (include mine above about reading in daily life) to be true in real life. Learning to read does make your pronunciation better because you’re reading the tones correctly. And reading helps you pick up words you see around the place, like หยุด! (Stop!).

One key problem I noticed though was that even though I was studying reading and speaking with the tones, I didn’t really know… anything? I couldn’t make sentences and I didn’t know common words. This actually got me into trouble once (ask me privately if you want to know how).

That’s when I realized that learning to read and pronounce Thai was just a speed multiplier for other learning. A nuance that I didn’t think of before I started.

Don’t forget energy management. Learning when I was tired probably reduced my efficiency 85%.

This was a big one. Because I could schedule tutors whenever I wanted, I often took lessons between things at work or after it. The problem was, I was usually completely toasted by the time I took the lesson.

It felt like nothing stuck and I couldn’t wait for the lessons to be over. I liked all my tutors, so it wasn’t their fault, I was just a crap, demotivated student.

It would have been better to schedule lessons only when I was feeling fresh at the beginning of the day. Sadly that hasn’t been practical for me, but it may be for you!

My number 1 study tip is to develop and refine a study habit.

Wrapping this up, my final lesson would be that the most important thing I did to improve my Thai was to develop refine a study habit.

First I thought of all the moments of the day where I could tack on some Thai study. Then I tested different methods to see what I could stick to. Over time, I’d try adapt my routine so that I did that every day, work or no work. This was how I got in two massive chunks of consistent study of 40 and 24 hours respectively.

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Interesting resources:

• Language Lords on YouTube (Link). This dude is a machine at learning languages and has some really interesting, and motivating, techniques. Check him out.
• Journey: The Language Learner’s Ultimate Guide to Maintaining Motivation by Erin N. O’Reilly (Link). I talked to Erin once for a strategic language learning consultation and she really, really knows her stuff.
• Finally Learn Thai.com (link) my friend Oliver Eidel made this app for learning Thai. Give it a go.

What kind of marketing tactic costs nothing to do, scales and spreads itself bringing you inbound enquiries over time?

Well, that sounds like content marketing.

This was the answer to a question I asked myself, “What would be the best marketing skill of all to develop?” as a marketing freelancer (now focused on Meta Lead Advertising) looking to bring in work over time.

I had hoped this could become a new service offering that I could master for myself and my clients.

And content marketing seems relatively simple, reading the advice of high performers like Justin Welsh and Nicolas Cole (I’m a fan of both, btw). Just pump out a high volume of work, see what works, refine and repeat.

Taking Action

Following this, I made 40+ podcast episodes and 68 long-form articles over 18 months, which were promoted across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Indiehackers, Reddit, Medium, etc.

My little podcast was listened to thousands of times and articles the same.

Sitting back, I assumed it would eventually pay off with even a trickle of emails, replies, comments etc.

The Results

But an audience didn’t materialize.

People read and listened but they didn’t respond with likes or comments.

Despite spending hours planning, writing, recording and editing pieces, they weren’t often shared beyond a few hit podcast episodes.

I think for the 1.5 years of my podcasting efforts there was single inbound enquiry.

Content Promotion

Naturally, beyond improving the content, I tried to fix this by pushing harder with promotion. I pumped my LinkedIn, Twitter feeds, Slack posts, groups, etc with shared links.

But it didn’t make a difference.

While the actual content journey itself was fun, embarrassingly, in reality very few people wanted to be part of my ‘audience’.

Thankfully but sadly, it’s not just been my experience it seems. Content overally is a tough game:

• A 2022 survey by the Content Marketing Institute itself found that “72% of marketing professionals today describe their content marketing campaigns as falling between flat-out ineffective and only mildly effective.” (Source)
• In fact, per eMarketer/Goldman Sachs in 2023, only 4% of content creators make more than 100k in revenue (Source). But to be fair, that’s a pretty high bar… 🤔

Going Beyond Transactional Content

Then my friend shared with me a point of view that taught me where I went wrong:

It is better to have 500 people who know (and like you) than 50,000 people who follow you for memes.

That was it. Content production by itself is just motion.

To be effective, content has to go beyond an information transaction and instead build that know, like and trust factor.

Content marketing in this instance is not about volume of articles or reach. It’s a digitsed networking engine.

This frame change means focusing less on output and more on creating pieces that are relevant to a target reader but also help build a strong connection to myself.

That means including myself into the work, not just pumping out anything I think could be useful.

For example:

• I created a lot of marketing interview podcast episodes with the hope that guests would share the work, too (News: They usually didn’t). I should have made solo episodes on my topic of expertise.
• I needed to focus on topics that naturally feature yours truly and my topics of expertise. Rather than publish so broadly, I.e. general marketing content.
• Lean more into connection-building formats like video over text. (Note: This is one reason I made a YouTube channel).

• Included more photo or visual representations of myself. In action 😏, potentially to connect the reader with the writer.
• Be honest with myself about when I’m publishing as a hobby (like this article) and when there is a commercial purpose to avoid wasting time.

Thinking aloud, this is probably why:

• We remember more personable, emotive writers — even if we don’t remember what we learned from them.
• Nobody honestly remembers the last PDF lead magnet they downloaded.
• I can’t name a single HubSpot blog author 😂 despite them successfully dominating half the web…

Especially now, there is so much AI-generated content that even recognizing an author can be hard.

And reading around after the fact, I find the view is well understood for podcasts, as explained by Jason Cercone.

I think content is still a powerful marketing tactic but I’ve learned that it has to be done in the right way:

Focused on connecting oneself with the reader through relevant topics with a clear personal connection.

In September 2023 I made the logo for my paid ads micro-agency Hungry Bear using AI. While I don’t really seek work as an agency and instead rely on my freelancer profile, I thought it’d be great to give my corporate brand a professional look.

Here’s how it went:

Originally, I tried to zero-shot the process with Midjourney. I found a tutorial for logos at AiTuts (link) that showed me the prompt can be as basic as using “flat vector logo” + {object} + {style}.

Here’s the prompt I ended up using:

The results were decent, but not a finished design. So I prompted and re-prompted probably 20+ times but it wasn’t usable yet.

Eventually this was the best version:

I liked the 1st one (top left) so I sent it to my designer Peter, asking him for feedback (he liked it) and to refine it.

We kept it black and white to avoid getting distracted with the colour and font choices. He cleaned it up into something like this:

Finally, we experimented with colours and fonts and got this. I’m pretty happy with it. So I rolled it out across my site and other socials.

What do you think?

Networking online doesn’t have to feel awkward or blatantly transactional.

Over the years as a freelancer I’ve used a simple 5-step process to attract client referrals, build genuine relationships and develop allies who support my goals (and vice versa).

Many are surprised to hear that as much as 50% of my client work comes from my existing network. I’m the kind of introvert who limits calls per day and leaves events an hour or so after starting. But with the right approach, I find networking can feel easy and natural.

So here’s how you can do it too.

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1. Focus on friendships, not transactions

Imagine you’re only on a mission to make more professional friends.

I think most people imagine networking means things like going to speed networking events and getting business cards from boring people with bad breath and who talk too much.

It’s not like that.

To me, it’s a game where you’re trying to connect with smart, helpful, friendly people you’d enjoy having a coffee with now and then and catch up.

That’s the target.

I’m not saying shut yourself off to age groups or people with political affiliations you don’t tend to get along with (that would be too limiting). But keeping friendships as the focus will help you enjoy it, and make the whole process natural.

Start with this.

‘Dream 100’

“Just make and maintain 2,500 contacts.”

A mentor of mine in university once taught me this as being core strategy of being a successful real estate agent for luxury and waterfront properties.

He calculated ~3% of people will move in a year and if these 2,500 people know, like and trust you, maybe 30-50% of those will ask you to sell their home. In Australia, assuming the commission to the real estate agent was $20,000 AUD, that’s $750,000 per year.

I know you’re likely not selling real estate, and don’t need that much business, but I think this strategy applies broadly.

Say you’re in a niche like as Meta ads management, too. It is true that a single digit % of people will need ads help themselves each year. And another % will know someone who does. This is the quantum of referral opportunity.

If I had to pick a number to aim for then 100 sounds like a good starting target.

2. Start with people you already know

Work with the connections you’ve already got.

It’s obviously easier to network with existing connections on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc even if you’ve never talked to them. You’ve probably had something in common at some point.

Yeah, that includes old school mates or former work colleagues.

You can literally open up your LinkedIn and scroll to the bottom of your contacts and start messaging or emailing people from there. Work your way up the list.

If you’re connected and actually don’t like that person just skip them.

What to message

So remember that part about making friends? How would you message someone you’re an old but not super close friend with after a long break?

This is the tone to aim for.

I usually share that I’m curious how they’re doing these days and would love to hear what they’re up to.

Depending on the warmness of their reply, you can suggest you guys catch up for a quick 15-30 minute coffee via Zoom chat to catch up properly.

Find a time, send a calendar invite, done.

What to say if you’ve never talked before

If you haven’t talked before, you’d change the message.

Give a genuine comment on something they look like they’re doing and suggest a 15 minute virtual coffee chat so that you can learn more about what they do, and potentially compare notes (if you have work in common to share intel on).

Why 15 minutes?

It’s a safe bet.

15 minutes is long enough that if you dislike each other, you don’t have to make an excuse to leave and it will be over soon. If it’s great then you’ll both leave feeling positively and that you’d like to talk again.

The first meetings are usually a little rough anyway. You’re just starting your connection.

3. Don’t waste the conversation

To open a call is easy.

Share again why you’re reaching out, which is probably that you noticed you two have something in common, or they’re up to something interesting, and that you wanted to catch up or learn more about what they’re up to now.

Most people will continue the conversation from there.

First, ask about them

Find out what they’re doing. How does that work? What do they like and not like? What projects are they dreaming of?

Firstly, this gives you an opportunity to help them if appropriate. Which in itself is good networking.

It also leads them naturally to ask your side of the story. Most socially aware people will ask about your work, goals, and challenges.

Now you can explain what you’re doing and what you’re working on.

• If they’re interested in a product or service you provide (prospective clients) they’ll ask more about it.
• If they think you can help someone (referral opportunity) they’ll ask more or ask if you can help their colleague.
• If you have a problem that they’d like to help you with, they’ll offer it.

No pitches and no begging required.

And if they don’t care about your product or service then they probably won’t ask about it at all. Don’t force the topic.

Avoid making big asks to new people

I think it goes without saying, but if you don’t really know someone yet – avoid making any big asks on the call. You haven’t developed any connection capital yet. That comes later if the business relationship develops more.

But you can still ask for very small, gentle lifts. E.g. information about something or for any introductions to people they think appropriate.

Don’t rush to help them either

Of course, you want to help the people you’re chatting with.

But if you push too hard it can come across as very forced on a new networking call. People will get that feeling you have an urge to ‘scratch their back’ just so that you can get something in return.

Be cool.

Ask first if they’re interested in your opinion about a problem or if they’re open to an introduction to someone you know before offering.

Ending a call is easy

Most calls end around the time allocated.

If they aren’t wrapping up the call by themselves, an easy conversation winding-down topic is asking them their plans for the year/quarter. You can also gently add in the conversation a reminder that you value their time, know that they have other things to do, and suggest that you two might need to let them go.

(At least, that’s what I do 😬).

Thank them for making the time and suggest you two keep in touch.

At this point, if you two get along super well then you can also suggest to catch up in say 3-6 months to hear more about {something that came up in the conversation}. That will naturally set your next conversation to deepen the relationship.

Take some notes

These can be on paper, email trial, Notion or other tools.

You need to remember what you last talked about somehow. It’s embarrassing not to know somebody has just had a kid or is suffering an unfortunate life event when you reach out time and end up looking like a total arse.

I sometimes use Notion to do a quick recap, date we caught up, when we should probably next catch up.

4. How to keep in touch without overdoing it

Most of the benefits of your network come drip by drip over time as you support and make stronger connections over time.

So you’ll need to keep in touch.

But that doesn’t always mean having another call.

Sure, if you vibe with someone, you can keep catching up on calls with them as much as you like. If they’re an older generation, you can even *gasp* call them. Unannounced! Though I suggest reaching out at least once a year to keep the connection alive.

For others, you can keep in touch in other, really low-touch ways.

You can:

• Like or share their posts on social platforms.
• Comment on their articles and videos.
• Share them awesome articles you know they’ll love (it has to be great stuff, and don’t do it more than once every now and then).
• Send an email, at least once a year. Birthdays, New Years, etc are easy occasions.
• Buy their products and send them what you think, or leave reviews.

I even ask people if they’re OK for me to add them to my email newsletter as an easy way to keep in touch and for me to share what’s going on. They’ve only said yes.

5. Expand by focusing on where you want to go

At some point, you may finish these lists and start looking for new people.

My suggestion here is to be targeted.

I’ve found it effective to network with people that I can still probably be friends with but who have a stronger, natural cross over with my work. E.g. freelancers, personal brands, agency owners, etc. People who I might want to collaborate with, or likely be able to refer business between each other.

Obviously you can also network with anyone you think you’ll get along with.

But based on this – will networking be a thing you try in 2025? Why or why not?

Hey folks.

In January 2024 to February 2024 I did 31+ days going cold-turkey on caffeine to better control my energy and improve my health, ‘no-caf.’ It was a pretty rough experiment (you’ll see why soon) so I wanted to write my notes on the experience here so the agony didn’t go to waste.

Why go no-caf?

A lot of people are interested in no-caf and I got into the idea based on watching a video by Alex Becker (link).

I thought about it and decided to try it. For the record, here’s a recap of why I wanted to go no-caf:

• Stress. It’s apparently linked to physiological and psychological stress.1 So, would you purposely drink something that makes you feel stressed?
• Uneven energy. I’d get energy crashes and shakes after drinking coffee. I wanted to have a more even distribution of energy.
• Poor sleep. It’s pretty clear that caffeine and disrupt your sleep, which is a top 3 health lever of the sleep, diet, exercise trifecta.
• Addictive.2 I like the idea of limiting myself from things that are addictive in general. Which is partly why I don’t drink alcohol. I’m obviously failing that with sugar, though.
• Dopamine adjustment. I was trying to reduce artificial highs caused by things like coffee, so that the dopamine released from doing productive things like work, which are naturally relatively lower, is instead relatively higher.
• Essentialism. A bit of a moral appeal, but my grandpapy didn’t need no coffee everyday just to do a honest day’s work. Why should I?

Quite a few reasons. Actually.

📅 Timeline

• Day 1-3. Started strong. But it was pretty clear that I was heavily addicted and came down with typical withdrawl symptoms after a single day with frequent, long headaches and dizziness. I also had the overwhelming urge to smugly bring up how I’m doing no-caf to friends…

But I also noticed some key benefits happening:

• Less shaky when hungry.
• My sleep score improved from ~82 to ~87, the highest ever according to my Fitbit.

I also talked to a mate who was quitting it too for mutual support. He sent me a Reddit thread where someone explains it took them a year to get back to normal (link). Nice.

• Day 4-30. A blur of worsening than gradually reducing headaches ❌. Working each day feels very sluggish to get into, but once I’ve started it’s easier to maintain into the early afternoon.
• Day 31+. I question whether it was really worth it. I noticed feeling like a daily injection of happiness is missing. I’m getting frustrated that my work is too slow to engage in every morning.

✅ But on the positive side:

• Headaches are gone at this point.
• Sleep improved marginally 5% on average, and stayed that way.
• Still less hunger “shakiness” come lunch time.
• Avoiding caffeine got me drinking healthier stuff instead, like a daily ginger tea.
• I felt consistent energy from the morning to early evening.
• Surprisingly, my “digestion” had totally changed, too. To 2-3x per day (is this normal?!).

For the downsides, I have been told by professionals this is temporary as I get back to homeostasis. Encouraging, almost.

Would you make the trade?

Quitting no-caf

There was a point after the 31st day I just gave up.

I needed to power through the day and my natural energy wasn’t up to the task. The first cup back was glorious, as you might expect. A higher-high than usual.

Thinking at the time – my sleep had not drastically improved to be that noticeable and the other benefits did not outweigh the benefits of that daily boost of both happiness and energy. So I swung back to caffeine again.

Reasons for caffeine

Now, I’m happy to continue with caffeine. These are the reasons:

• Motivation control. Having sustainable motivation is not as useful as having control over your motivation. Sometimes you really need to push yourself and if I rely on natural willpower alone it’s just way harder than it needs to be.
• Energy control. Similar to motivation, sometimes you feel “the mind is willing but the body is weak.” Using caffeine gives me more control over not just my willpower but my physical ability to amp up to the tasks I need done.
• Enjoyment. I think most people who drink coffee can attest to that daily spike of happiness than comes from the world’s most popular drug.

There does seem to be a lingering drawback though. I can say I still feel an elevated sense of stress and nerviness that I didn’t while off caffeine.

So that was my journey.

Has anybody else tried this?

Trying Cal Newport’s digital minimalism practice for a few weeks was like putting on noise-canceling headphones.

While it significantly increased my peace of mind and lowered my time on digital devices, It wasn’t easy to sustain for long before I hit roadblocks that pulled me back in.

What is digital minimalism?

The crux of digital minimalism is to take a considered approach to using technology to achieve more productivity and peace of mind.

The idea comes from the practices of the Amish.

Cal explains that the culture of the Amish is to carefully consider whether technology is good, or bad for their values and community. If it is considered unhelpful, it is avoided, and vice versa.

To go through this process yourself, Cal suggests taking a break from digital technology and selectively reintroducing what adds value.

How the process works

Cal explains this in his book, outlining a two-phase process:

1. Take a cease-fire from nonessential app technology for 30 days, then reintroduce digital tech afterward.
2. Re-introducing digital tech afterward with purposeful consideration of what you need, and why.

This is how the process went for me.

Timeline Overview

Here’s a quick overview of how my journey went with the idea.

• Week one, I read the book and started implementing the idea of the digital cease-fire. I moved all the temptation apps on my phone to a special folder, so I knew whether or not I was stepping over the line. I full on deleted some like Twitter. I started changing the way that I messaged people to emphasize coordination for real human contact over messaging.
• Week two, By week two, I felt more at peace but also started getting really bored. Without the feeds of Instagram, and YouTube, to distract me, I ended up feasting on books. As much as I love reading, this can dry out really fast if you’re also avoiding blogs. I was probably doing it wrong, but I avoided digging into rabbit holes via YouTube for the time being too.
• Week three, I started caving. Life dramas triggered me into finding easy distraction and comfort from the feeds. Back to YouTube and Instagram scrolling for a few evenings.
• Week four, I’m starting reintegration early. Cal suggests doing 30 days first but I couldn’t last that long. The boredom was killing me and also, I felt frustrated not being able to use my typical digital means of digging into rabbit holes.

⏱️ Results

My mental health and relationships improved.

The pace of life slowed down. There were genuinely fewer distractions, and I was getting more peace of mind. And I would say my stress level went from 8 out of 10 to about 5.

My average screen time on the phone went from 5 hours per day to 2.7 hours.*

*This would have been lower still, but during the experiment I had a few bad days where I was only able to basically just zombie-out watching shorts or reels for awhile.

This wasn’t sustainable though, because I had to re-integrate technology. So the hours per day is back up to what it was before, but I would argue that it’s higher quality.

Key Benefits

There were some awesome benefits. Some of these you would expect, others, maybe not:

• Less time wasted on social media. Cutting the social media root was great because, basically, all the platforms give me some form of agony.
• Whether political or simply discussions designed to provoke a reaction, I found it interesting how each time I moved to a social media platform like Facebook, or Twitter, it was feeding me something that was trying to hook me in the very first post.
• Less mindless watching. I’m a fan of business and marketing-related stuff on YouTube, and sometimes I fool myself into thinking I’m not wasting time because it is edutainment videos. But it was just passive learning. Now, I jump onto YouTube and research a specific topic that I want to learn about and stop once I feel I have satisfied with that vertical.
• Fewer notifications. Because I changed my messaging style to wards coordinating better quality interaction, such as phone calls, the amount of light touch interaction needed was reduced significantly. People don’t need to ping you every day if they know you’re gonna call in a few days.
• Better conversations. In his book, he emphasizes Human interaction with people rather than mere digital connection with people. This means conversations and video calls, not messages and likes. You really do feel more connected and heard, and likewise, your friends do too.
• More focused study. By relying on books and purposeful inquiry, I studied more productively. I jumped onto YouTube only to learn something specific. I read a book on the topic instead of getting pulled in a thousand directions by Wikipedia or blog spirals.
• Better routines. Knowing that I needed to control my digital habits meant that I built new routines around when I engage with people. I reintegrated messaging technology into my life during lunch breaks and dinners eaten alone, for example.

Challenges

As you can expect, not all rainbows, though. Here are some of the challenges.

• Different perspectives on messages. Some people just love to ping back and forth. Particularly significant others. It can be hard to change to a higher-quality interaction focus without making people feel ignored or neglected.
• Boredom. The author warns that you need to be prepared to replace new downtime with hobbies. But there’s only so much you can do if your hobbies are fairly intensive. There was a lot of time where I had no idea what to do and didn’t have enough energy for any seriously demanding hobbies. I mostly defaulted back to reading books.

Tips

If you’re interested in trying digital minimalism these tips might help you.

• Prepare some time-sink hobbies. If you’re gonna have a lot of downtime, you really do need to prepare what you’re gonna fill the gap with. I suggest walking and reading.
• Discuss with your significant/close contacts. This is a key area of support. It will also make your experience easier, since likely, they may be the most impacted.
• Schedule messages. Both reading and replying. Scheduling emails to send at the end of the day prevents back-and-forth distractions and allows the recipient more time to respond thoughtfully.

• Leverage media wishlists. You know on YouTube how you can save videos to watch later? To stop yourself from scrolling use the feature. You can also use Pocket to save blog articles to read later. This helps break the reflexive habit of endless scrolling.
• Lean on content curators. I used Glasp to source of some of my read-later content rather than self-discovery. They saved me from getting stuck in the scroll.

So, has anybody else tried this?

Having been actively marketing for the last 10 years, and hired maybe a dozen juniors, this is a summary of everything I’ve learned and my tips for people trying to break in.

I will add the caveat that my experience is more towards working with startups and smaller businesses. But I’ve had a pretty decent spread of positions across the US, UK, and Asia, and on both brand and agency sides so hopefully, my advice can apply broadly enough to your situation.

I get that the current environment is hard so hopefully this can help.

Getting Experience Without A Marketing Job 🤔

If I had the appetite for risk, I would bet you $10 that this is probably your number one complaint.

How are you supposed to get jobs where everyone asks for experience if no one will give you a start? I’ve been there and I recall wanting to throw my laptop out the window when I saw a job post like this.

It is crazy frustrating.

The good news is that there are a couple of ways that you can get experience without having someone employ you in marketing:

• Make a blog. This was actually one of my cheat codes. by doing a blog, you can show that you can create content and probably do some basic analytics on what is performing and what isn’t. but if you take it to the next level, you might begin to start promoting your work on social media to get traffic. And hey, now you’re getting involved in social media. Heck, you might take it a step further and try to get subscribers, so now you’re doing a form of inbound lead generation. Your blog doesn’t even have to be about marketing. I created a super basic blog way back in the day that was just me interviewing people who I thought could share really interesting insights. It’s an approach I still use today on my podcast, but prospective employers loved it.
• Write socially. One small downside of running your own blog is that no one’s going to see your work until you stop promoting it. Which is a great thing to learn by itself. But you also sometimes need the data super quick, so writing on social platforms like Reddit and Twitter and Medium will give you that feedback. Again, this will show that you can create content but you’re also data-driven in learning what people like to read and how you can use that to optimize your posts.Treat your professional brand as your own business and build that up to show people that you have vision and the skills to build a brand. Spend some time developing an online portfolio, develop your social media skills — especially LinkedIn — and then use those as resume builders! I had an applicant who had no official business experience, but they had amassed a subscriber list of 1,000 contacts and 25,000 LinkedIn followers.Nick Mattar, Marketing Educator and Founder @ Digital Detroit
• Highlight your existing experience, where ever it comes from. When you’re new, and even when you’re experienced, your imposter syndrome is going to be through the roof. That’s okay, but don’t let it stop you from seeing the experience that you already have. For example, have you ever scheduled social media posts for anything, even your own Instagram account? Have you grown a social media following on Twitter by being a nutcase about games? That’s relevant experience. Have you done any kind of research on what people might like about content or products or how they consume media? That’s marketing experience.
• Make a small business. This is such a no-lose proposition. Provided that you don’t go absolutely bonkers and break the law, if you do a small business like selling T-shirts print on demand, or making a small neighborhood service such as cutting lawns which you promote using flyers, you’re going through the full works of creating marketing plans and executing them. The worst case is that you get experience. The best case is that you actually make yourself an income and an alternative to getting a job. You don’t need a perfect idea, just try something and go through the motions for 6 months.
• Volunteer. It’s intuitive to think that you can look for marketing roles at charity organizations or non for profits, but you can also fandangle your way in to do a marketing-related tasks even if that’s not the core of your role. For example, when I was a university student I volunteered at the MS Society I and pitched creating a student internship programme, which involved needing to market it to recruit students.If you’re keen to get into marketing, but lack experience, ask if your friends and family know anyone running an agency that can give you some work experience. Offering your services for free, e.g. writing blogs or helping with outreach tasks is a good way to learn, get feedback from marketing professionals and build your CV.Beth Baxter, Founder @ The Blurb Agency

Hopefully, these 5 ways show you some ideas and how you can get experience without actually having a marketing job already.

Starting Career Pathways 🗺️

Okay so you might be working on your experience now, where should you apply?

Honestly, I think you should just apply everywhere if you’re trying to break in but here are some general categories. These will be relevant to you if you’re looking to pursue a particular type of marketing career.

• Marketing agencies. The two main types are strategy/creative agencies that do stuff like cool branding and advertising, and execution/tactical agencies like your local web design or Facebook ads shop. Keep this in mind because if you’re thinking you want to be Donald Draper, then you’re going to be looking at a strategy, creative or advertising agency and not a pay-per-click house. But if you want to blow up apps on the Apple App Store with ads, then you’re looking at a tactical agency. The advantage of working for agencies is that you’re going to get a wide range of experience because they’re going to have a whole bunch of clients that you work with- not just one company. Arguably is more stressful though because you’re on the service end of the relationship working with other companies.
• Brands. These are the companies that buy services from marketing agencies. This is not just consumer products but also includes services companies, tech companies, etc. If you want to work with a particularly cool company, then this is the way to go. Also, it gives you the advantage of seeing your ideas come to fruition over a longer period of time. Arguably it could be less stressful than working for an agency because you’re the buyer if you work with a bigger company. If you work with a small startup, then it’s going to be stressful because you’re going to be having to do everything and work it out yourself. Management is going to be crap as well. The advantage of working with a smaller startup though is similar to working with an agency. You’re going to get a broad range of experience which you can use later.
• Freelancing. This is an interesting one because it’s similar to the starting of the business idea above. You’re going to go through the motions and you’re going to get experience no matter what you do. My advice is you going to have to pick one thing to try at a time. It’s really hard to get good at multiple things at the same time. Think of each service you offer as a product line and try to be as specific as possible. For example blog post writing, or email writing. Not email funnel building or inbound marketing. These are more advanced and you can get there, but the likelihood that you’ll actually be able to get any good at them in a short period of time is very low. You could think of it like a tech tree where you start at the bottom and then you work your way up and add more complicated offerings as you go along. For example, you might write blogs, then move to press releases. or you might write blogs and then move into lead magnets, then into conversion rate optimization etc.

Again, I don’t suggest you necessarily pick one pathway to start since you’re trying to break in here but it helps to know what the lifestyle might be like ahead of time.

Application Tips 📌

I know there are a million and one CV tips out there, so I’m trying to keep this to the stuff that you may not have read elsewhere.

• Use a text-based CV. It is tempting to make your resume in Canva, but the problem with this is that companies are using application tracking systems that screen the text of your CV. So if you do it in a graphical way sometimes the screening goes wrong. You’re better off using a nice clean word-based CV.
• Get feedback. Ask your friends and family who work in marketing for their feedback on how you can tailor your CV to better explain your marketing experience. it’s like having a free resume-writing service.
• Apply like it’s your job to apply. People are shooting out like 10 to 20 applications and then wondering why they’re not getting any interviews. When I finally got my first job, I was told that 150 other people applied as well. It is a numbers game. That was just after the global recession thing and it’s probably even worse these days. You need to hit hundreds of applications. Don’t worry about stuffing it up and doing a crap application. If 150 people are applying to the same thing the odds are that they remember your accidentally stuffed-up application is basically zero.
• Prepare for questions. We all know it’s a game but at least in this one you can work out the typical questions that they’re going to ask ahead of time and prepare some smart answers to them. Trying to be authentic and stuff here is cool, but the odds are everyone else has polished answers and you’ll just stand out as looking unprepared.
• Follow up gently. Try to apply directly by email where appropriate. this will let you follow up gently because odds are, Given the number of people who are applying, your application will get lost so this is important.
• Try harder than everyone else. Once you start getting interviews, now is the time to over-prepare. try to do things that impress the employer. For one job I got I had basically prepared an entire marketing plan for them to go through and they loved this. I was the only one who bothered.

With these tips, I hope you can start to take some action and start getting interviews.

Nice To Have Certifications 🏅

In my opinion, certifications are nice to have because they show you have some knowledge of the areas you’ve studied, and this saves time when onboarding new folks.

Sign up for a free HubSpot account and start getting certified, starting with Inbound Marketing, then on to more specialized certifications like Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, SEO and more. You can get really valuable hands-on experience using HubSpot that you can add to your LinkedIn profile and resume to showcase your skills in a very tangible way.

Jennifer Nixon, Marketing and HubSpot Expert at maka Agency

• HubSpot inbound marketing certification. This certification is free and it’s fairly robust in that it covers a lot of essential topics involved in marketing. Truthfully is directed more toward the startup and services industries, but it’s nice to have.
• Google Analytics. While Google is changing to GA4, much to everyone’s annoyance, Google Analytics is still the basic standard of online analytics. If you actually learn this and get good at it, you’ll look slightly better than a lot of other applicants. And there’s no escaping it, you’re going to need to learn it at some stage anyway.

If I had to choose one, I think it would be Google Analytics.

Recommended Books 📚

If breaking in was an exam, and you were looking to study to prepare, reading books to some degree is a little bit of an irrelevant distraction. But I do think they’re useful to help understand the greater context if you’re willing to put in the extra effort.

• The Long View by Brian Fetherstonhaugh. The author was the head of Ogilvy Canada, and wrote about how to manage your career. to me, this gives you the overarching structure of how a marketing career works. The basic summary is that when you start you focus on gaining skills, in the middle of your career you focus on making money, and at the end you look to give back.
• Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by Alan G. Lafley and Roger Martin. P&G is considered one of the best marketing organizations in the world. This is the top-down view of how they view strategy, and is very relevant to marketers. Strategy is easily a third of marketing but gets less than 10% air time. So it’s worth reading this one
• Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. These guys are the popularizers of the inbound marketing approach which is very relevant to service businesses or B2B SaaS companies. It gives you the framework of which the tactical marketing is happening.
• Hacking Growth by Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis. This is a foundational book for startup marketers, particularly those working with apps or platforms that involve lots of users spending time there. It gives you the overall framework of how to think about growing an app or digital product.

Again, I don’t think reading more books is necessarily the thing that is going to get people the job but it’s nice to have a greater perspective.

Other tips 🛟

Here are some other pointers I got from asking the marketing community:

Get into communities and groups early on, whether it’s on Slack channels, Reddit groups, Facebook communities, LinkedIn groups, etc. The insight you get from just observing the discussions by the experts there is gold!

Khyati Agrawal, Marketing Manager @ Content Beta

What To Do From Here 🏁

Hopefully, that wasn’t too much to digest all in one go, but regardless here is a quick roundup on what to do from here:

1. Start a blog
2. Finish your resume
3. Get feedback and adjust
4. Start applying now, and keep applying
5. Create a list of the common questions
6. Prepare your answers
7. Get the Google analytics certification
8. Read one or two relevant books

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about community engagement for marketers to understand what certain groups of people are interested in and talking about.

Naturally, LinkedIn groups would be a fit for this, but my short interactions with them in the past have been quite sad in that I see most groups mainly full of spam.

But you know, that was in 2010 or something. I should probably take another look.

Here are my notes, not that in-depth but perhaps enough that you can get a quick read on the group situation yourself.

Is anyone interested in LinkedIn groups?

As you can see from the graph above, my super scientific method of looking up LinkedIn groups as a keyword on Google trends shows that interest has been slowly dying over time.

Hmm, no surprises there.

This is really sad to see but what was interesting to me was that popularity seemed to be greater in certain countries.

Singapore?

Singapore of all places seemed to be a really engaging place for LinkedIn groups. So I decided to have a closer look. Perhaps they will have some halfway decent groups.

Are LinkedIn groups full of spam?

With the country identified I headed over to LinkedIn and found one of the most popular groups that I could fairly easily join.

And I noticed as soon as I joined was that the group was mainly full of spam, as expected.

The first non-link post after 36 link posts in a row.

(Good on you, Sandeep!)

I appreciate that a lot of people have some great content to share but it took me quite a few scrolls to actually see posts that didn’t share a link and focused on networking or discussion.

I can’t really get a proper read on Singapore though. No other group accepted me. (The group quality is … probably ok, in there?).

Ok, so this was Singapore, but what about other places?

I decided to try and join a whole bunch of other groups and see what some of the stats were on how many posts were sharing links or spamming, and how many were starting discussions.

Unfortunately, many were much, much worse.

I won’t screenshot them here because they need all the help that they can get, but many of them had around 59 link posts to 1 conversation-related discussion post.

Is it worth posting in LinkedIn Groups?

Knowing that most groups were full of spam (except for maybe some Singaporean groups), this made me start to question, does posting in the groups even work?

I headed over to a super popular group with over 144,266 members and set up a poll.

Polls have been taking over LinkedIn recently so I thought this would be a really easy way to get a read on polls.

I will admit, maybe my poll wasn’t very interesting or useful to the hundreds of thousands of people in the group, but two votes including one of my own is a little sad.

Are they useful?

OK so posting in groups isn’t even that useful anyway it seems. Perhaps the reason is the reputation has been so tarnished that people don’t even bother, or there is way too much spam in the first place.

I reached out to about five different group owners as well to see if they were willing to share some insights or thoughts with me but sadly none of these have been accepted to date.

I might come back and update this email later once I have heard from some of them.

The question I have is, “What should LinkedIn groups be used for anyway? “

When I think about it, it’s not necessarily a great place to make new connections. You can just look people up and LinkedIn probably wants you to use Sales Navigator if you want to get more targeted in your searches.

For posts, you’re probably better off posting to your entire audience based on how much engagement and impressions you are getting on these things.

And lastly, for building a community, well it seems that Facebook groups are much better for this.

(An honourable mention here goes to Slack too which seems to always have interesting communities being created despite the lack of supporting features. But back to Facebook groups…)

Having run a Facebook group myself and even knowing that members don’t even see every post on their feed anyway, it is much easier to run a group on Facebook even if it is business related.

Something that doesn’t work well on Facebook, however, is trying to market events.

Anyone who has run ad campaigns for Facebook knows that the ad objective on Facebook is pretty bad at getting people to actually register.

They have that dumb feature where you can select “I’m interested” instead of “yes I’m going”, and that still counts as a conversion on your Facebook event ad campaign.

LinkedIn on the other hand much better response rate and you can invite people directly to an event using their mass invite feature.

Yes, I will admit that some people are abusing this right now but it is still a good feature if you’re running in an event yourself.

This brings up an interesting idea.

What could LinkedIn use groups for?

From what I can see they look like they could be an interesting opportunity for LinkedIn to use their groups as a way to build communities through virtual events.

If you survey the market you can see that webinars tend to be more popular with the professional crowd, rather than hobbyists, friendship groups and party-goers.

If LinkedIn wanted, they could probably become the go-to place for online professional events and have them nested in groups.

The audience is already there, people are using the mass invite feature and they are getting results.

Why connect events to groups?

From my experience running events, having the event attached to a group is a key way to get future attendance for upcoming events.

Groups complement and keep the events running.

When people attend more than one event and know other people in the same community, then they are more likely to attend the next and the next.

Perhaps if they leaned into this they could possibly even capture some of the professional communities back from Facebook.

Closing Notes

In any case, I hope you found this as interesting as I did. I know LinkedIn is probably not going to see this post so what are we really going to do about it?

I still have some hope for LinkedIn groups in that they may come back one day but right now it seems their potential is still yet to be realized.

But then again, I said the same thing about Google Plus.

This past week I finally submitted my exam for Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Marketing. Mark’s course covers 10 lessons in marketing, combining the best in theory and practice, to teach his marketing planning methodology.

Overall, it has been the best marketing course I’ve taken. I was honestly a bit sad for the experience to end as I was keen to drill into more detail and practice each of the concepts over time.

In order to make the most of it while the experience is still fresh, I’m sharing my key takeaways from the course:

1. Source external company data for the bigger picture

Especially when working in small businesses or technology-focused ones, my natural tendency has been to work out what is currently working and why.

But this distracted me from understanding the market as a whole.

Internal data only tells me what worked for the people who already converted, and who those people are. While the rest of the market may be the same, they may be different.

Getting external data, like from a survey, will help me understand the other opportunities out there in the market.

2. Use surveys to quantify %s of what people think

Surveys always seemed to be a deep-dive activity to me, designed for specific circumstances when you wanted to learn more about people’s experience with products.

But here, I learned that surveys can often be the backbone of your marketing plan after having done qualitative research.

A strong survey has questions that collect information on:

• Demographics
• Purchase funnel activity
• Brand perceptions
• Media habits
• Pricing tastes
• etc

Armed with the information above, I will have most of the answers needed to build a strong marketing plan.

3. How to properly segment a market (and use that to make choices)

Market segmentation is something that I had mainly ignored in practice and relegated it to being a concept that I thought was only for big companies.

But not true.

While I’ve also learned from a podcast interview on segmentation (coming soon), I learned in the course that segmentation is essential to forming a good strategy. It helps me understand who I’m targeting, why them, and what to say exactly.

Often, when working with SMEs and startups, we rush into the marketing with a pre-defined target in mind. At the same time, we don’t take the time to learn who else is out there and whether we’d be better off targeting someone else.

A key tool in Mark’s course was his meaningful and actionable grid. Here are some explanations of it:

• The Right Way to Segment a Market by Ian Barnard
• Market segmentation? Unwrap the best way to nail your marketing strategy by Peter Preston

4. Marketing strategies should be simple to survive the real world

I’ve read countless marketing books which have taught multiple views on marketing and business strategy. However, what I’ve found is that they often avoid spelling it out explicitly.

Mark teaches in the course that strategy, in some sense, is overblown. It’s not necessarily the most complicated thing. It’s a combination of three things:

1. Who am I targeting?
2. What’s my positioning?
3. What’s my objective/s?

As you can see, it is a simple framework but Mark warns it’s not necessarily easy to get right. There is a lot of marketing research and thought that goes on in the backend to make sure that I’ve targeted with good judgment, positioned well and have proper SMART objectives.

😁 Sidenote: Yeah, I cringe a little bit too at hearing SMART objectives. The concept has always seemed a bit rigid to my taste. But in the course, it really does make sense as a strong way to set objectives such that the objectives are instructive and clear.

5. Do both brand building and lead generation

After having been exposed to some of the work by Byron Sharp, using data to prove that you may be better off doing sophisticated mass-marketing rather than targeting, it was great to see Mark’s perspective here.

While not his exact words, the understanding I gained was that his answer is to do both. Long-term brand building to the whole of the marketed (sophisticated mass-marketing) and short-term, targeted marketing to key segments. He calls this ‘bothism’. I’m sure it will catch on.

In a way, this makes sense given the arguments for and against targeting. Against targeting, suggests that most people aren’t in the market for any product or service at any point. The 95% sit here. So why only target the 5%? Instead, build your brand salience and availability.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/i0OKdtaJ8g0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

On the other hand, pro-targeting arguments suggest that you need that 5% because they are responsive and will give you the ROI on your marketing efforts.

Mark provides an interesting metaphor in that you need brand marketing (long-term) to grow the tree, and targeting (short-term) to pick the fruit.

Read more: How Brands Grow [Speed Summary] by Brand Genetics

6. Decisions multiply their impact on each other

This was a great point raised by Mark, which is that marketing is multiplicative. He explains that there are three stages:

• Diagnosis
• Strategy
• Tactics

His point is that you need to do a proper diagnosis to create a proper strategy. And a proper strategy to choose the right tactics. Screwing up one will screw up the others, sequentially.

This was an interesting point to reflect on as I’ve seen in practice that sometimes the best execution can only grow the business so much until it hits the limitations of the strategy.

This also came out in the exam, where screwing up one part of the process early could lead you down the garden path for the sections that followed it.

7. The core basics of marketing

One of the major values I got out of the course was Mark’s curation of the marketing models out there.

It was interesting to learn how certain ideas and practices developed over time. It became valuable when you had an experienced, reputable industry practitioner go over them with the understanding to pick out which ones you really needed to listen to and why.

In the end, it was a relief to know that there were truly a handful of basics to get right:

• Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
• The Purchase Funnel
• The 4Ps

Better yet, these were the classics.

While I have been over these in both formal learning at the CIM and elsewhere, I feel far more confident and purposeful in my marketing abilities after learning these classics properly and in a way that is practicable.

🖐️ Sidenote: One unexpected part of the course was that Mark himself was very approachable. While he may swear a lot in his presentations, he was very gentle and patient in dealing with folks both on the biweekly Q&As and in the LinkedIn community.