Lauren Holliday.
Pretty freaking powerful.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s rarely the best path to becoming a leader in your industry. Hire me to help you set trends, so you can stop copying them.
🦄 "Purple marketing unicorn" -- Clients' words, not mine
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20+ viral articles
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5M+ visitors driven to websites since 2012
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11,658 Reddit Karma
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300+ posts syndicated on mainstream media outlets
My Backstory
Past bosses have referred to me as a “purple marketing unicorn,” meaning I can do a lot of different things very well. While I love the term they’ve assigned me, I prefer to use the word “polymath.”
For a long time, and even still sometimes today, my diverse skill set and interests have been a problem for some people, who want a “trained” designer, or a writer, who specializes in “healthcare” or “fintech.”
I remember, for instance, being a managing editor at a big, niche publication, and the design editor refused to publish my piece on how to write a good case study for designers because I wasn’t a designer (his words, not mine). But in the words of Taylor Swift, “Karma is my boyfriend,” because that post came right back in his face when it blew up on an even bigger design blog a week after he rejected it.
He is technically right though. I’m not university-trained in website or UX design. I studied journalism, but I was never like the other journalism students.
I didn’t want to only learn how to write and definitely not only how to write in a dry, uninteresting, unbiased tone. I had a personality and strong opinions, and I believed writing could be fact-based, well-reported and heavily researched all while being edutaining (educational + entertaining).
The biggest difference though, between my journalism peers and I was that I wanted to learn how to make my writing reach a wider audience. It was (and still is) a huge high to me to see my byline on a really good piece of content that I labored over making great, but even more exhilarating is the messages and comments I receive from readers. I knew I wanted to get as much of that as I could from every piece I published.
So when everyone else moaned about having to learn Twitter and create a WordPress blog for a journalism class, I jumped at the opportunity. I still have the remnants of that first WordPress.com blog I created some 14 years ago now. #oldmillennial
And when everyone else applied for the typical newspaper internships, I begged my professor to let me do an editorial AND marketing internship for the biggest local newspaper in south Florida — the Sun Sentinel.
While everyone else was focused on just collecting more journalism clips, I was diversifying my portfolio with not only different types of published writing clips but also innovative digital marketing case studies. During my time there, I launched and grew accounts on Tumblr, Pinterest (when they were still in beta!), Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.
I taught myself all of the above, and these were my ideas my boss listened to and reaped the benefits of.
This experience paved the way for my second, REMOTE internship in 2011, about 10 years prior to remote work becoming a trend. Again, this internship focused on writing AND marketing, but this time for an ecommerce company with a blog that received 160,000+ unique visits per month.
I started by writing blog posts and promoting them on their massive Facebook page, which I grew even bigger — by 465 percent in just 15 days of posting organically.
This is where I learned SEO… in 2011! No one talked about SEO back then. It was the first time I saw a backlink/outreach spreadsheet and learned about writing meta descriptions and titles based on keyword research.
This is also where I started faking it til I made it. I convinced my boss to let me redesign the WordPress blog, which was a big deal because it received so much traffic.
He said yes.
The problem was I needed help. So I went to the computer center, where I was introduced to Macs for the first time and a kid named James, who was SO smart and taught me how to use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere Pro, so I could redesign the graphics as well as the blog.
James taught me about websites, like Treehouse, which featured the best classes on things like HTML, CSS and other cool digital skills back then. It was so exciting because you received digital badges that represented your skills as you completed courses, and I loved collecting as many as I could.
During this time, I was also writing for the school newspaper, where I had become the weekly relationship columnist; I cleverly named it “Knights with Benefits,” as UCF’s mascot is a Knight, and I created and managed a Twitter channel for it.
Next, I got sucked into photography thanks to a photojournalism class. I bought a DSLR camera, which allowed me to capture amazing pictures of Daniel Tosh unexpectedly visiting UCF, which was huge breaking news for our school, as he was an alumni and well, Daniel Tosh. Cha ching! Another type of portfolio piece.
In February 2012, I was the first in my class to get a huge story published on the front page of the Valentines’ Day issue of the second largest print publication in Orlando — Orlando Weekly.
My entire class laughed at me when I pitched the idea, but the editor of Orlando Weekly loved it. No one else had written about the story yet aside from New York Times and Maury, making it even sweeter that I had the foresight to be one of the firsts alongside an elite publication, like NY Times.
The investigative article on the sugar baby lifestyle was my longest piece at the time — a whopping 4,000 words. I had to create fake Facebook accounts and go undercover on sugar baby dating websites (no apps back then!), like seekingarrangement.com, and I was able to get impossible-to-reach people on the phone and in-person to talk to me about their experiences.
On the day of publishing, a popular XM radio station reached out to my editor, asking to interview me on-air as the sugar baby expert.
“Expert,” I thought?! I guess I was after studying the phenomenon for months and interviewing loads of interesting people, including psychology researchers and the founder of Seeking Arrangement, which is the largest sugar baby site still today.
Before leaving UCF, I accomplished a lot of other cool journalism things, like interviewing the president of UCF, who hadn’t been interviewed by a student in the last decade, and I landed another cover story for Orlando Weekly.
While these accolades were awesome, they were not what I remember most about that year… 2012 is the year my father cut me off, and I unexpectedly learned SO much because of it.
I worked my way through college by waitressing at a restaurant on Universal City Walk, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to work enough to make enough money to survive on my own, along with trying to pass four classes and freelance writing to grow my portfolio.
This led me straight to UCF’s Career Center, where I met a brilliant woman, named Kathleen Rancourt, who I’ll never forget. She taught me about quantifying bullet points to make my resume stand out, how to write a compelling cover letter and how to dress for an interview and more.
Even with all of her help and a resume full of great experience, I struggled to land a full-time job because I was still in college with 28 credits left unchecked on my degree audit, and everyone just saw me as unpaid intern bait.
At this point, I was angry and suddenly, I realized I wasn’t the only student suffering from this unpaid internship/fed-up parent problem. In fact, I was part of the majority, so I marched over to UCF’s Entrepreneurship Center, and I began learning how to start a business to solve our problem. (The irony is that while I failed my business courses, I LOVED business IRL.)
By mid-2012, I founded Freelanship (freelance + internship), an Upwork for PAID freelance experience opportunities, and I took everything I’d learned from my previous experiences and “helpers,” like James and Kathleen and used it to nonchalantly market my startup.
I was active on Tumblr, where I published educational career-centric posts, with downloadable templates (Thanks, HubSpot!), about how to make a resume and a cover letter and how to brand yourself online, and I interviewed cool people for my podcast.
I made a free Mailchimp account and collected emails with a shitty sign-up page that was shorter than a scroll.
Little did I — or anyone else besides HubSpot — know that at the time what I was doing was actually called “content/inbound marketing.”
Simultaneously, I was also learning a lot of other, valuable skills, such as hiring and managing freelancers (back when Upwork was still Elance), running a business, creating business and marketing plans, leading my co-founders and pitching investors.
My pitching eventually paid off, when I won a local Startup EDU Weekend, which bought me a spot into UCF’s business accelerator program. I won a $3,000 check and gained three co-founders and a plethora of super smart mentors and investors to learn from and network with over the course of three months.
My job search was depressing though. I finally landed a job, after I got creative, as the marketing director for a small print shop in Kissimmee.
The owner was very smart and forward-thinking. He was phenomenal at selling, and he saw the dawn of content marketing before most, hence the reason he hired me.
I sold him on hiring me before I even met him for an interview with an ebook about myself. I stole the ebook template from HubSpot. It was just a PowerPoint template that I saved as a PDF, but he loved it.
As the marketing director, I created the business plan for PIP’s newest digital marketing offerings, where we sold current print clients on managed blogging and social media services as well as website designs.
I created what he called “vertical marketing toolkits,” which basically just meant we’d go after specific business verticals that would be easier to convert at first and allow us to streamline processes and get more business.
By December though, I couldn’t keep my head above water anymore. I was dying trying to establish my startup, write cover stories, pass four classes and work 40+ hours per week at a full-time job.
Everything was suffering because I couldn’t focus, and eventually, I couldn’t afford to pay my rent anymore. I got evicted and had to move back home. I was devastated. Everything I had worked for, gone, only to have to drop out of college without a degree — the worst sin you could commit if you wanted a real job someday.
Somehow, I “made it” without a degree though. It took me six months of waitressing and freelancing for small businesses to get my big break for a $72,000 / year marketing director position at a small startup bootcamp in Boston in 2014.
I’ve accomplished a lot since then, so much so, it’s been overwhelming to choose what to feature on my website from my Trello board of achievements. Yes, I have a Trello board of my achievements — how else would I remember them all? Plus, it’s a great pick-me-up when I’m suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome.
Like Taylor, I didn’t set out to become a polymath, but I did as an extension of my love of words and making sure the entire content experience is amazing.
Taylor does everything for her fans. I do everything for my readers. I have entirely drawn out visions for content projects I’m working on, and even those I’m not, but despite all of the results I’ve gotten over the years, I haven’t always had enough control to fully bring my visions to life.
I want to work somewhere where I have the resources, autonomy and authority to make the decisions I need to make in order to create amazing experiences that compel the PERSON enjoying the experience to take action… without ever forcing them to.
Even more, I want to work somewhere that is filled with people who are smarter than me in different areas — collaborators, who double as mentors — and people who have amazing taste and put out high-quality work, every time.
If that sounds like you, and you like what you read, please reach out. I’m ready to make your competitors afraid of little old me. 😉
