Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Entrepreneurs podcast. I’m here with Seth Gold. Seth is a former newspaper journalist turned digital marketer and podcaster. He’s worked for a variety of news outlets over Pennsylvania and New Jersey. After getting massively burned out, he switched to digital marketing and started his business at the best time, in ’08. The idea was to start a business to get a job, and there have been ups and downs throughout the journey, but he wouldn’t change a thing, at least that’s what he wrote. He hosts a popular podcast called Entrepreneurs Enigma, where he talks about his experiences. When he’s not working, he loves to travel and spend time with his wife, son, and their air doodle, Olive. Yes, that’s right. How’s it going, buddy?
Seth: Oh, it’s always great hanging out with you, thank you.
Dave: Yeah, pleasure to have you on the show. I appreciate you’ve been coming to events at PTE since the early days. We’re still in early days, but even the earlier days. And it’s great to kind of have some time. So, you know, I’m learning new things about you every day. Tell me about being a journalist and why you got burned out.
Seth: Well, journalism was a love of mine. Apparently, everyone knew in high school that I was going to be a journalist. I ran the school paper, I started the school paper, ran the school paper, but I fell in love with web design at the time. So, once… but that was back in 2000, you know, Y2K era, and decided that I should get a business degree. But I didn’t want to do accounting, so I went for history, journalism, and minors in anthropology and political science because they all show that you can write in different ways, very drastically different ways. I mean, journalism writes like every sentence is a paragraph versus like everything else is convoluted long paragraphs. But, did that, got hooked when now President Biden, then Senator Biden, talked to me on the phone. He’s Blue Alumni, so University of Delaware alumni, and I was hooked. So, we got started working for a few dailies out in south-central Pennsylvania, did that for a while, worked for the Bucks County Courier Times, and then the DU on Tenser for a little while. This overdid it and burned out. It was just… I was young, scrappy, and I was like, “I love this, I’m going to do this to the most of my ability.” Didn’t have a family at that point, I mean, I have my core family, but I didn’t have like a family of my own to really worry about, so I could just kind of live it up, and I lived it up. Burned out six years later, still had PTSD from the job. Besides, you know, it was a lot. And I later on realized it wasn’t really made for me to be a journalist. I’m too sensitive, according to my wife. So then I left that. My then-fiance, my now wife, was like, “Well, you’ve been doing web design on the side for all this time, why don’t you go into web design to get the experience to get the job?”
Dave: Well, to 202, when my son was born, for me to then get the job at Merc for about a year and a half, get some corporate experience. But, I can’t stand corporate at all, because corporate is its own beast, and you’re either made for corporate or you’re not, and I’m not made for corporate either. So went back out, reopened up Goldon Media. So it’s been a 16-year run with Gold Media, with a brief hiatus in the middle for about a year and a half at corporate.
Dave: That’s awesome, man. Congrats. Not a lot of people can obviously say that they’ve been kind of doing something for 16 years. I can’t believe I have either.
Seth: Yeah, it’s… uh, month is 16 years this month. Happy birthday.
Dave: What was that switch like to digital marketing from journalism? There are some similarities obviously, but a lot of fundamental differences. How did you kind of adapt? How did you learn the new skills?
Seth: I did go back to school, to the University of the Arts. Got a certificate, not a degree, got a certificate in web design. That’s kind of honed my skills a little bit, get a little more formal education behind what I kind of already knew but kind of had to learn the more advanced technologies. And the main difference between the two is that one, you have to be completely factual, completely technically above board, whereas marketing, you can kind of be more creative. And I would never say lie, but you could present things differently, and it was nice to be even more creative. And the whole time I was a journalist, I was doing websites for people on the side because, you know, you’re a journalist, you’re not making any money. I mean, it’s… you don’t make a lot of money as a journalist unless you make it to like the old, you know, New York Times or something. Then you’re making okay money. But so, I’ve been doing that, doing it on the side, so it’s kind of a natural progression because a lot of journalists either go into marketing or they go into PR, more going into PR because we’re bombarded by PR when we’re journalists, so it’s kind of natural that we know what we’re talking about. So we go over to PR. I never wanted to do PR, so I was like, “Let me do marketing,” because that’s what I had originally gone to school wanting to do was digital marketing. So, and that eventually moved from websites into SEO, into digital marketing strategy, into video optimization, into email marketing. Let’s put all the keywords in here so YouTube finds us very well here. Good.
Dave: Yeah, I love all this. Podcast production, education, etc., analytics. Let’s just throw it all in there.
Seth: Exactly. So, I was doing podcasting since 2010. I was like, “This is a cool medium.” Kind of taps into my journalism roots a little bit. And so, Entrepreneurs Enigma was a pandemic project. This was kind of skyrocketed into something that I didn’t know was going to happen. So, yeah.
Dave: Talk to me about writing. You’re a guy who’s obviously written a lot in various forms. What does it take to be a good writer?
Seth: Trial and error, and practice, and honing. Now, I mean, you can get the rough draft out in AI, but never take the AI draft and put it out there. But you can get your ideas out with the help of AI and then kind of work with it. We didn’t have AI back then, so we didn’t have… we had to come up, you know, get past that blank sheet problem and put, you know, words on paper. And I mean, yeah, it was demoralizing a lot of times when you’d go to your editor with this story, and they’re like, “Well, this needs to be changed. This paragraph needs to go up here.” You’re like, “Well, I’m a writer.” He’s like, “You’re a writer; you’re not an editor.” And the editor is a completely separate set of eyes on your work. I feel like everyone needs… even when you do website copy, you know, I read through everything my content writers write because they write well, but they can also write… good. And if they write good, they’re not writing correctly. I’m like, “Ah.” So, I have to go through and kind of read through what they write, make sure it makes sense, and all that, you know, and no, nothing… not to knock them or anything like that. And that’s fine, but a second set of eyes is kind of crucial when you write. You always need to hand it off to somebody, hand it off to a significant other, hand it off to your co-worker, and say, “Hey, just read this through real fast. Does it make sense?”
Dave: Yeah, I love that. You know, the trial and error, which is so true in like many different specialties, and then making sure that you’re getting that fresh pair of eyes on it. I personally think that writing is maybe one of the most valuable skills I’ve ever learned. When you think about, you know, whether there’s a long-form blog post or just email or even just like how to write a WhatsApp message to my wife so she doesn’t get mad at me. All these different types of things, you know, it’s all really writing and communication. I think it’s a certain… yeah, a super important learned skill. But you’re not just a writer; you’re also a man of words, spoken words, that is. You have a podcast, Entrepreneurs Enigma. How do you like that transition? Talk to me about podcasting. I haven’t had anyone on the show who does their own podcast. What do people need to know before they start one?
Seth: Just get started. Just get started. It’s that simple. And keep going. You’re gonna get better. The first is gonna be a cluster… it’s gonna be a dumpster fire. And I would not get rid of… I would still post them, put them out there. You’re gonna… I mean, we’re all going up on 200 episodes of Entrepreneurs Enigma, shockingly. I can’t believe I’ve done this many. And the first few are not like they are now. And I go back and listen to them, I’m like, “Oh, this is cringeworthy. I should get rid of these.” I’m like, “No, this just shows the progression.” And remember, you’re not NPR, you’re not trying to be Terry Gross, you’re not trying to be Marty Moscoine, you know, over at WHYY, over in Philly, where we’re from. You’re not trying to be… it’s not radio; it’s podcasting. You’re like… like we’re not trying to be… you know, I mean, DAI is pretty buttoned up here, but, you know, but I mean like we’re not trying to be NPR, we’re not trying to be public radio. We’re more like Barsky in the morning if you remember that, like, you know, it’s more like chewing the fat, having fun. And then, like, don’t be overly into the editing. I mean, you want to… you don’t want to overedit because then it sounds choppy and people can tell you overedited it. Whereas it’s like if there’s an “um,” fine. If it goes “uh,” then you might want to edit that out. I wouldn’t edit that out there; making an example. But you know what I mean. So, finding that balance.
Dave: Um, so yeah, basically we’re in the middle of a dumpster fire right now. I don’t even know it. It’s an early episode. It’s great, though. No, I hear what you’re saying because, yeah, I… and it was… you know, I asked you for advice when I said, “Hey, I’m starting this show. Like, what should… should I do Zoom? Should I do Google Meet?” Like, and you said it doesn’t matter. Just do something, just kind of get it out there.
Seth: Exactly. Eventually, I moved to StreamYard. I… I do everything on StreamYard now, not to stream, just to use their tools. But I… I’ve used Riverside, and they’ve blown up in my face a few times. You know, it’s just… you try, trial and error. You know, I’ve had… I had a guy on three times for the same podcast because I kept on screwing it up. I felt really bad, but you know, it happens. You know, it happens. Wi-Fi craps out, different things happen. Last little question here is the one I hate even kind of bring it up because it’s the one that everybody kind of asks, you know, when they’re talking with someone in digital marketing, and you mentioned AI and, you know, obviously, your background in writing and web design and stuff like that. It sounds like you occasionally you’ll dip into the tools and you’ll edit them and stuff like that. How are you feeling about AI content creation, the type of content we’re seeing these days, your thoughts?
Seth: I love the idea of AI. I think you have to be wary about it. You have to kind of, you know, it’s its own tail. It hallucinates. I was on a call prior to this where a guy said that he was doing his dissertation. He needed like, you know, 10 more citations to read through. Well, it gave him eight good citations and made up two. So don’t assume that it’s always correct. Check your citations, check your content, make sure what it’s spitting out is correct, edit it to put it in your voice, add more detail, add less detail, get rid of the “in conclusion” they put it at the bottom. It’s like a fifth grader, that five-paragraph essay format. It does, you know, beginning, middle, end, but say “in conclusion” or “in summary.” I’m like, “I don’t write that way.” Yeah, I’m like, “No, we can’t use that.”
Dave: Seth, love the straight-shooter sort of approach that you take to answering questions. For people that want more of your content, whether it’s your podcast, whether it’s your agency, where can they go and find you?
Seth: Gold Media.com is right there. Where… that specifically, as a PR, you have a hat.
Dave: Okay, I have a hat. I have a few hats. I also have the Entrepreneurs Enigma hat. Switch that around real-time.
Seth: Switching around, exactly. Um, yeah, I’m bald, so you kind of need hats to keep, in the summer, to keep your head, keep your head from, you know, scorching.
Dave: Right, exactly. But, you know, you can go to EntrepreneursEnigma.com. You know, I also do a weekly newsletter. I don’t know where I find the time to do it, over at MarketingGTO.com. So awesome.
Seth: Or on LinkedIn for Seth Gold. We will post that as well. I look forward to being a guest on your show next month. Thank you so much for being just a supportive member of the community. I love it. It’s great.
Dave: Thank you for having me, and thank you for doing the community because that’s a process in its own. It’s its own beast.
Seth: It is. See you, man.
Dave: See you, buddy.