Marketing yourself is one of the hardest things to do.  Selling something else? Easy.  Selling myself? No thanks, I’d rather drink this acid.

But it’s vital to walk straight into that which challenges and scares you. That’s why I developed a new one-pager for myself and updated my website to match. 

Here’s the story of it.

The Problem

Brevity is the soul of wit, and my original About Me page was entirely too long. The first contact with any funnel must entice and intrigue, not infodump.  Conversion only truly happens when you take your customer on a journey, and all journeys have to seem easy to start. Otherwise, you’ll never take that first step on the road and get swept away.

What I needed, in film terms, was a teaser.

The Teaser

A good teaser doesn’t reveal the entire plot. It shouldn’t even tell you much about the premise.  It can hint at subplots, side characters, and general ideas, but ONLY hint. It needs to give you one reason to want to come back and learn more.

In this way, developing a teaser is a wonderful exercise in forcing you to determine what the One Thing is that will hook people. And developing a teaser about yourself forces you to examine yourself to determine what that is. 

This is probably why so many people struggle with marketing themselves. Doing it right requires really examining yourself. 

What makes me unique? What problems can only I solve? Sure, I’m creative, but so are all copywriters and most marketers.  Our jobs require us to come up with new, creative ideas.

So what makes me me?

The Focus

I am the only professional creative in my immediate family.  My younger brothers are electrical and industrial engineers, respectively. My little sister is studying engineering.  My stepmother was a chemical engineer. My mother and father were both geologists before moving into teaching science and the C-Suite, respectively.

(On a recent family vacation, my father off-handedly told my siblings that I had won an all-state math prize in high school. This blew their minds.)

My mother raised me with a healthy respect for the scientific method, which is the functional basis for all A/B testing. She taught me to love math and numbers, to not be afraid to get up to my elbows in the data.

In the second half of his career, my father modeled project management when he talked about his work.  He showed me how to delegate and to build systems that support those around you.  Most importantly, he taught me that projects must serve tactics, which must serve strategy.  They can’t just exist for themselves.

I can produce the most exquisitely crafted, clever, creative copy in the world. If it doesn’t bring in more income, then all I’ve done is pat myself on the back.

That’s who I am.  Not just a copywriter, but a marketing manager.  A creative who builds a strategy, executes tactics, and tracks the data to learn the results. All with the end goal of growing your business, not my own ego.

Want to see the results of this strategic creative thinking? Check out my portfolio to review some of my proudest achievements.