This is an abbreviated summary of my professional story. My formative years were truly invaluable and set me up for the subsequent journey I was to take. However, the learnings and experience that I gained through self-directed education have played a much greater part in the unfolding of my career. This article is written in honor of the amazing opportunities for learning and self-development that are increasingly at our fingertips in this age of digital information.
I was a model student from elementary school through college. Straight As, teacher’s pet and never missed a class at college (well almost never). Languages and writing were my passion, and I graduated from the University of Reading, U.K. with a Bachelor’s degree in French and Italian in 1993. My goal was to go into journalism. Living in multicultural London in the pre-internet era with a language degree under my belt, I felt that the world (or at least Europe) was my oyster and that I would land a job in a jiffy. Oh, how wrong I was! I interviewed at countless companies; large corporations, smaller publishers, even banks; they all turned me down.
Trading disappointment for grit
One afternoon, while taking a break from job-hunting, I was introduced to a young man who was an extremely successful foreign exchange trader at a brokerage firm in the City of London (Financial District). It turned out he traded on the Dollar/Lira desk and that they had a need for a trader who was fluent in Italian to deal with the Italian banks. He urged me to apply for the position, which I did, and, in the blink of an eye, I became the first female trader at that desk at Martin Bierbaum in London.
The environment was very noisy, hectic, downright stressful. I had absolutely no experience in currency trading, so I relied on my fluency in Italian to differentiate myself. It was a challenging and educational nine months. I learned to deal with the A-type, highly-strung personalities of the trading world and developed a strong sense of patience, perseverance and grit. Ultimately, the duress of the job got the better of me and I decided it was not a lifestyle to which I was suited. I felt that my creativity was not being stimulated, and so I moved on.
Mastering IT
My boyfriend at the time (later to become my husband) was a computer programmer and assured me that IT was where the future was headed. He urged me to take an accelerated class in IT to layer on to my Bachelors in Languages. I decided to go for it and, a year later, I graduated from the Queen Mary College with my Masters in Information Technology.
The research project for my Masters (as suggested by my professor) had involved coding a basic search engine program in the C programming language. Remember, this was before Google and the Internet was in its very nascent stages. Mosaic (later Netscape) was the de facto web browser and was brand new. If only my entrepreneurial spirit had got an early jumpstart and I had taken the idea of the search engine more seriously…perhaps I would have developed a more sophisticated application and taken on the world (tongue out at Google)!
Fast forward a couple of years and I ended up settling in Tampa, Florida with my new hubby, Max, working as a C++ programmer at a utility company. Object-oriented programming was all the rage at that time. I worked in the world of classes, encapsulation, inheritance and SQL databases until I decided to put my career on hold to raise a family. While I was raising my two kids, I worked part-time at the local elementary school teaching kids basic computer skills, and I also taught an undergrad C++ programming class at the University of South Florida as an adjunct instructor.
Getting to grips with Flashy websites
In my ‘spare’ time, I dabbled in Flash animations and Flash web development because I was fascinated by this new technology. Once the kids were tucked up in bed, I would read books, get online and soak up all the resources that the World Wide Web had to offer, follow tutorials and spend countless hours on Flash development discussion forums, until I had the concepts of timelines, layers, animations, easing, .SWF files and vector graphics down pat.
It wasn’t until Max started a side hustle as a wedding and portrait photographer and realized he needed a cool website to showcase his work, that I truly entered into the wonderful world of digital marketing.
Flash websites were the shiny new object back in the late 1990’s. Flash wasn’t just a tool or technology, it was its own genre. Any professional photographer worth their salt had a snazzy Flash website with animated slideshows and background music that provided an immersive and emotional experience for the bride-to-be or the expectant mother. Max wanted in on it too. He needed a Flash website to compete with the other photographers who had burst onto the scene with their fancy online storefronts and so he asked me if I would do him the favor. How could I refuse?
Focusing on entrepreneurship
Within a couple of weeks, I had developed a spiffy new Flash website for Max’s business which we threw up on a hosting provider (Media Temple). It served him well, and soon I was approached by other professional photographers looking to achieve a custom website of the same caliber. My first business, Photoidentities Inc. was born.
After doing the custom website gig for a while, I realized that there were companies out there making a killing selling Flash website templates rather than custom solutions. These were skins or themes that would allow a photographer to log in to a back-end control panel and edit the website content themselves. The early version of Wix or Squarespace, if you will. By designing multiple variations of a basic template – changing out styling, layout, image transitions etc.- these companies were able to scale much quicker and fulfill the increasing demand for off-the-shelf solutions. I decided to follow suit and, after many sleepless nights, iterations of development and testing and, dare I say it, failed releases, I finally launched a collection of Flash templates complete with Flash-based interactive control panel, ready to hit the market. The patience, perseverance and grit I had learned back in my days at the trading desk had paid off.
Flash fades but digital shines brighter than ever
They sold like the proverbial hotcakes and, with some SEO work on my company site (yes, I taught myself how to do that too), my company website was ranking #1 on Google for the search term “websites for photographers”. Of course, SEO-ing my own site and not doing the same for my portfolio of growing clients was not an option.
I continued to immerse myself in the world of SEO – backlinks, keyword research, directory listings. Google My Business didn’t exist at that time, so it was a matter of researching high quality photographer directories and forums and negotiating reciprocal links. I propelled many of my clients to the first page SERP for their target keywords. My clients’ clients were finding what they were looking for on Google and loving the smooth and seamless web experience. They were purchasing wedding and portrait packages like it was going out of style. Life was good. I had become a successful, self-taught digital marketer!
Business was booming and I was, by now, providing fully managed hosting for my clients’ sites on my own web servers as well as designing logos and marketing creative for them. Then the next evolution in my career as a digital marketer took place.
The Flash bubble burst, so to speak. The earliest signal of Flash’s fall came in 2007, when Apple decided not to support it in the newly introduced iPhone. At the time, the fifth version of HTML was about to emerge, and promised to replace some of the functionality Flash provided. With the nascent mobile web in mind, developers across the world began moving away from Flash and toward HTML5.
Enter left stage WordPress websites. Again, I dove head first into online tutorials and forums on WordPress theme customization and web development, paying close attention to the power of the ubiquitous WordPress plugin. Soon I had a suite of WordPress/HTML5 photography website themes which I was able to offer my clients as an upgrade to their outdated Flash sites.
Meanwhile, I also started to offer custom WordPress website development services to small businesses. I landed clients within a variety of verticals from education to law to HVAC to beauty and the list went on. SEO also became a core offering. I would cheerily educate each of my clients, “It’s no good having a beautiful, state-of-the-art website if nobody can find you!”
Needless to say, running my own marketing agency exploded from there. Email marketing, paid advertising, display and programmatic, SEO, social media, web, creative design in addition to traditional tactics such as billboards, signage and print collateral were all part of the integrated strategy we offered.
Without any formal schooling in the dynamic space of digital marketing, I had become an expert in the field and, at the same time, had fulfilled my passion for creativity and communication. It was hustle, determination and many, many nights burning the candle on both ends that got me to the point of being a successful entrepreneur and digital marketer.
The learning never ends
Fast-forward again to now, the sheer volume of online information and learning opportunities is growing exponentially on the daily. By being a voracious reader/podcast listener and absorbing the wisdom imparted by thought-leaders in the business and digital arenas, I’ve become a thought-leader in my own right and am passionate about sharing my knowledge and experience with others.
Reputable online certifications have allowed me to fine-tune my technical aptitude. Executing my skills at agencies and businesses has helped me to become a well-rounded professional in the digital marketing space.
This crazy and fascinating world of digital marketing keeps evolving at lighting speed, It’s the white-knuckle experience that keeps me excited to stay on the leading edge of innovation and help brands make a difference as they head into their own unique digital transformations.
In the words of Jim Rohn, “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune”. Do you agree?
