Marketing Ninja

I posted a tweet a few days ago asking my followers whether or not I should terminate Marketing Ninja, and having thought about it I decided not to. I was awfully tempted to tie the blog up to a fence post like Old Yeller, but ultimately I decided not to. "Why in the hell would I delete thousands of hours worth of work?!?!" you ask?

In the end it all came down to this: when I started this blog I was a bored programmer working in a dark, dank basement of a Vanderbilt University research center looking for a creative / entrepreneurial outlet.

The anti-capitalist attitude of the research center I worked for bothered me; the people who worked there weren’t overtly anti-capitalist in the sense of "money is evil maaaaaaaaan" but more in the sense of "I have my grant money locked up for the next two years – why would I want to deliver a finished product in six months?" I’m an ambitious person so you can imagine how I felt being surrounded by people who were, well, mostly unambitious.

So I started AjaxNinja, blogged a lot about .NET, got into Facebook application development, and eventually wound up getting involved in the world of marketing via web 2.0 and social media. I more or less fell into it. Eventually I renamed the blog to "Marketing Ninja," did a few consulting / development gigs for some nice people, and graduated from college in May of 2008.

Not long after graduation I was recruited by my father to work for the family business, SmartDraw. I had a few other intriguing offers on my plate at the time, but my father needed someone to help jumpstart the company’s efforts in the social media department. My other offers were largely technical ones where I would have been doing programming or one sort of another and frankly I was much more excited at the prospect of working in marketing, so I accepted my father’s offer under the condition that he understood that my tenure at SmartDraw would not be permanent.

Through all of this time I happily plugged away at Marketing Ninja, speculating about the online marketing frontier.

About two weeks after graduating from Vanderbilt I moved into a recently vacated cubicle at SmartDraw and got to work jump-starting their now-flourishing content marketing blog, Working Smarter. I spent weeks toying with different content marketing strategies. I was desperately trying to learn what worked, determine who our audience really was, figure out what they wanted to read, and see which of the social media marketing strategies that I had used to build up Marketing Ninja still applied to a corporate blog. It was excruciatingly stressful.

During that time I had hardly any attention to spare for Marketing Ninja – I was trying to settle into a new city, cast the die for my career, and start providing for myself. Naturally my interest in blogging about marketing waned – I was getting more than my fair share of marketing and blogging between the hours of 8am and 5pm five days a week. 

When September, 2008 rolled around we released the newest version of our product and for the first time in months I felt like I had room to breathe. The first thing I did was have a second custom theme built for Marketing Ninja, as I thought this would be an appropriate way to jump start the ol’ girl.

Well, I was wrong. I would come home from work, plop down in front of my laptop, open up Windows Live Writer, and simply stare at the screen wondering about what I could possibly say on my own blog. After all:

• I felt as though I was constrained to continue writing about marketing and only marketing;
• I couldn’t really talk about what I was actually doing at work – competitors do listen, as we’ve discovered;
• I hadn’t been following emerging technologies as closely as I used to; and
• Lastly, I spent almost every day writing page after page of copy for this, that, and the other – there wasn’t a lot of gas left in the tank for Marketing Ninja.

So when it came down to it the "future career in marketing" that I blogged so much about back in late 2007-early 2008 proved to be the near-death of Marketing Ninja. I really wanted to write, but just not about marketing and certainly not about market analysis. I wanted a more personal format where I could do whatever I wanted without being constrained by previous years’ worth of material and a humble following, and I considered simply burning down the barn to do it.

But in the end I couldn’t go through with it. I’m running a cutting-edge content marketing campaign for a small, but growing, business and I owe everything that I’ve done thus far to what I learned from starting this blog. Yep, I’ve said some pretty stupid things, some boring things, some things that a lot of people have found really helpful, some things that have pissed a lot of people off, and a lot of other stuff but it was all part of the learning process.

So I’m not going to delete it, and I’m going to start writing more regularly. I’m well-settled into my new job, my campaigns have proven themselves profitable, and it looks like all aspects of my life are stabilizing nicely.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!