About two months ago Brian Clark shot me over a text letting me know that the Copyblogger team was launching a top secret Podcasting Network (soon to be known as Rainmaker.FM) and asking me if I’d like to be involved.
I really couldn’t get over how perfect Brian’s timing was, as podcasting had been heavy on my mind for a good while. I had just talked to Scott Stratten a month before about the UnMarketing Podcast which after a year of production had been acquired by CBS Radio and my colleagues at Search Engine Journal had launched the SEJ Marketing Nerds Podcast last October. Nonetheless, I’ve been finding this podcasting resurgence thing to be intriguing.
Come early 2015 I had found myself treading water in a sea of podcasting, but not really knowing where to start. I also don’t listen to podcasts very often, but when I did I noticed that a lot of them were basically interviews.
Interviews are great, but I wanted to make sure that whatever I launched was somewhat original, and with a format.
Interestingly enough, when researching formats, I found myself not listening to podcasts but instead watching old episodes of Johnny Carson, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman.
So when Brian asked me, that text message sparked a sleeping publishing giant of sorts who’s been in slumber mode for pretty much the past 5 years. It was about 5 or 6 years ago I stepped away from blogging on Search Engine Journal for two reasons;
- I was finding that I was having bloggers block
- I was heads down in agency & consulting projects
- My wife and I had a kid, who takes up most of the time that I used to spend blogging
But also during this time, I was starting to also notice that my name was not appearing on as many lists, I was being asked to speak at conferences less and to an extent, publishing had changed.
Publishing now is more of a mix of the folks that will write the long form informative blog posts on one side of the spectrum and then on the other side of the spectrum the folks that take user generated content on social channels to the extreme.
The quick sparks and nuggets of info on the social side of the spectrum are appealing to me because that’s how I operate. I’m a machine gun explosion of ideas when I get excited.
The world of instantaneous social sharing of thoughts has been appealing to me. And the ability to contain these in a format such as podcasting where I can speak my mind for 45 minutes a week and bring friends onto the show is twice as appealing.
So, in total Loren Baker fashion, as soon as Brian brought up the idea I started texting and Twitter DMing him various titles for the podcast, formats, ideas for guests, frequency of recordings and a slew of other spontaneous questions.
That’s what happens when I’m excited, I go from calm & low-key Loren to crazy txting and emailing Loren.
Needless to say, Brian was the catalyst who got me off my ass to start podcasting and now a couple of months later, Search & Deploy has been born.
The format of Search & Deploy is simple. It’s the formula of success that worked when I launched Search Engine Journal almost 12 years ago.
- Cover the latest SEO and PPC News
- Filter out the noise.
- Focus on a major search topic.
- And add tips on how to deploy the findings from that topic into your digital marketing strategy.
Another reason behind the launch of Search & Deploy is also obviously to help market me and my friends at Foundation Digital. Expect to hear my business partner Greg Boser on the show from time to time, who also works best in an in-person or audio environment. In fact, Greg was the first rock and roll SEO podcaster over at SEO Rockstars back in the day with Todd ‘Oilman’ Friesen.
The Best Way to Learn Something is to Do It
And, as a content marketer, I like to practice what I preach. The experiences I’ve had in blogging have brought new positive directions to client accounts and expanding to other mediums only makes sense.
Marketing of Course
The last reason why I launched Search & Deploy with the Rainmaker.FM team was because it was a perfect fit in my 2015 plans. As I said previously, I’ve been pretty heads down on the agency side for the last 6 years and launched a new business in 2013. Although I spend most of my time developing and executing killer digital strategies with the awesome team at Foundation for our clients, I’ve had little time to actually market ourselves or myself.
Likewise, I made the effort to take on a larger role at Search Engine Journal in the past year beyond advising. I’ve been leading the sponsorship initiatives on the SEJ / Alpha Brand Media network of properties and launching new initiatives, like growing the site’s newsletters in 2014 and the SEJ #ThinkTank Webinar this year. In a way, these roles have helped to get me back in the thick of things that I love doing; thinking of ideas … and having the supportive team to help those ideas materialize.
Rolling into 2015, my goals for the year was simple (besides growing the two aforementioned companies):
- Start blogging again with at least one blogpost per month on SEJ
- Launch LorenBaker.com
- Start a Podcast
- Do one webinar per month (on SEJ or somewhere else)
- Increase speaking engagements outside of common SEO conferences & get travel expenses covered
- Start doing video
- Start a Local Los Angeles Meetup or Search Association
Well, as of March 2015 I’m happy to report that I’ve accomplished 5 out of 6 thus far.
- I’m blogging once of twice per month on SEJ or other locations
- I’ve obviously launched this blog / site
- Search & Deploy has recorded 4 episodes with a new one being published on Monday
- I’ve done multiple SEJ Webinars and just finished a webinar for SEMrush last week.
- I have 5 conferences lined up through June of this year.
- SEJ Summit w/ Searchmetrics in Santa Monica, London and San Francisco
- Pubcon Austin on 4/20
- Rocks Digital (which I’ll be Keynoting) in Dallas this June
- Ungagged London in May
- I have not started doing any video yet, but Meerkat may help with that
- I’ve kicked off the Los Angeles Digital Marketers Meetup with our first networking event on April 16th
Not bad. It’s been a busy Q1 2015!
Anyway, that’s why I started Search & Deploy. This is the most excited I’ve been about a publishing project since I started SEJ back in June of 2003 and I can’t wait to get 100 shows under my belt! The folks at Rainmaker.FM have proven themselves to be amazing and a great compliment to the groups I work with at Foundation Digital and Search Engine Journal… we’ll see where this takes us.
If you have any questions or comments on the show, please let me know. In the meantime, please visit Search & Deploy or subscribe on iTunes.
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