Welcome To The Digital Revolution Podcast
Welcome to the first-ever episode of the Digital Revolution Podcast. In this episode, I (Eli Adams) introduce myself, sharing a little of my personal and professional journey – from my early days building websites to my evolution into this vast digital world. I talk about some challenges I’ve faced, my time in retail management, my stint in the financial industry during the 2007 economic downturn, and my eventual full-time plunge into digital marketing and product management. I talk about starting Fire Us Marketing, a unique agency combining hands-on digital marketing services and training that empowers my clients to take control of their digital strategies.
Whether you’re a business owner, an in-house marketing professional, or just someone interested in the digital world, this podcast is aimed at elevating your digital presence online.
Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking us on YouTube!
Go to TheDigitalRevolutionPodcast.com to learn more!
Leave Some Feedback:
- What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below.
- Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.
Connect With Us:
Readable Podcast Transcript
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Digital Revolution podcast. My name is Eli Adams, and I am the host of this podcast. I wanted to jump on and do a quick intro about myself as well as maybe give you some context on what you can expect from episodes moving forward.
Now, this is my first podcast, so be patient with me. Hopefully, I can add some value to your life and convince you to come back and watch some future episodes.
Who Is Eli Adams?
So, who is this Eli guy? What makes him qualified to talk about all things digital? Well, I’m sure that if you look out there, there are a lot more qualified people to do this than me, but I wanted to give it a shot and see if maybe I could add something to your life that you’re not getting in other areas.
I built my first website in 1998. It was a quick and easy little website that I just put pictures of friends on, and it was kind of cool back then. For those of you who were around back then, being able to put anything online and seeing yourself on a computer kind of made you feel famous. So I built this little website real quick, put some pictures on it, and called it good.
Then fast forward to about 2003, and in 2004, I built my first e-commerce website. I had lived in Peru for a couple of years before that and made some good connections and friends out there. So I built a Peruvian merchandise website where my connections out in Peru would create this merchandise. A lot of it was done by hand. It was either wood carving or it was knitting some hats or gloves or real authentic Peruvian stuff, made out of alpaca and some really cool stuff either way.
So I connected with them after I had moved back from Peru and they ended up shipping me some of the merchandise, and I would put it on this website. I would sell the merchandise. I would take that money and I would send it back to them. Now, I did this for a handful of reasons. One, I wanted to learn how to build a website, but two, I really wanted to help the people of Peru. Many of them were struggling to make ends meet at the time. And so I wanted to do my part to give back. So I gave all the money that we made on the website back to this family, they would create more stuff for me and send it to me. And that lasted for maybe around a year.
Retail Management – Sam’s Club, Staples, & PetSmart
Then, I transitioned out of the digital world and spent about eight years in retail. I managed different national chains living all around Utah and spent a year in Grand Forks, North Dakota, as well.
Financial Services – Primerica
And then, while I was managing one of these chains here in Utah, I met my wife. I decided that the amount of time that I was putting into retail management, especially around the holidays, was probably more than I wanted to invest into a job as I was starting to grow my family, so I wasn’t really sure where to go from there.
I was introduced to a financial company that I could be a part of and we started to grow that company, and we ended up moving out to New Mexico. for about a year to see if we could grow something out there. And that was around 2007, 2008. And it was really really difficult to sell somebody life insurance or investments when they lost their job, and they couldn’t even put food on the table for their kids.
So we had a rough couple of months, and my wife and I decided we should pull away and maybe go back and get some “normal” jobs that could at least pay the bills a little better. That’s when we decided to move back to Utah.
When I moved back to Utah, I got back into digital marketing. That was over 15 years ago, and I’ve been in the digital space full-time since then.
Digital Marketing & Digital Product Management
Now, I say digital marketing, but what I really mean is digital. A lot of it was digital marketing, and a good amount of it was also digital product management, where I would work on the IT side and help build experiences and digital tools for the end user.
So, we would build the tools, and the experience, and then we would use digital marketing and push it out and promote it. And so it kind of worked in this nice little evolving circle where we could control all things digital.
Digital Marketing Agencies & In-House Marketing
After bouncing around from one agency to another, I did some in-house marketing for a handful of companies. Some were startups, and some were billion-dollar companies. There’s a huge range of different types of companies in between.
My last job was at a multi-billion dollar company where I managed all digital experiences. That included digital product management and digital marketing, whereas, in my previous jobs, it was kind of like one or the other.
So, after about eight years of working there, my wife and I had some conversations. I was having some health problems. I had heart palpitations, I was having high blood pressure. I was working so many hours just to keep my head above the water, which was affecting my health.
So, my wife and I decided it was time to pull away and maybe start my own business so that I could control my health and put more time into the work. It also seemed like a good idea at the time.
You all know if you have a spouse out there and it’s your spouse’s idea, and it seems like a good one and it was their idea, you go ahead and you move forward with that right?
Happy wife, happy life!
It was my wife’s idea, and I felt good about it, So I moved forward with it.
The Digital Experience Academy
So, I left that company and decided to start a training platform called The Digital Experience Academy, where I would train people with some training videos. I’d train people on how to build basic WordPress websites, put content on them, do SEO 101, monetize them, and make some money out of it.
What ended up happening is that I would have people go through the training courses, and then they would say,” Hey Eli, this is great, but I need a little bit more. Can you do some one-on-one coaching with me?” And so I would do one-on-one coaching with them for a few months, and then they’d say, “Hey Eli, this is great, but can I just pay you to do it instead?”
The Beginnings of Fire Us Marketing
So, inevitably, I ended up turning my work into an agency/training platform. It was really just a place to go with a good mixture of agency work and training.
This is where I decided to create Fire US Marketing.
I know! The name is a little bit unique.
I thought, well if I’m going to start an agency, how can I be different from every other agency that I’ve worked with or for? That’s when I came up with this concept: Since I’ve been both training and doing agency work for a lot of people, why not combine the two?
At Fire Us Marketing, I’ll do all of the upfront work for you as an agency. In fact, I can be an agency for you as long as you want. But, if at any point you’d like to cut ties with me and bring the work in-house, we can work out a deal where I will actually train you or somebody on your team about the marketing, the SEO, the paid search, or whatever it is that I’ve done for you, so they can take it over seamlessly.
At that point, if you feel the need, you can actually fire me as an agency. Hence the words “Fire US Marketing.”
So, that’s where the name came from.
Then I thought, okay, well, if I’m gonna be an agency and I want to be different than other agencies outside of allowing people to fire me as an agency, what else can I do?
Collaboration Is Key
I watched a YouTube video from Mr. Beast that talked about how, at the beginning of his YouTube career, he wasn’t just working by himself. He would put out some YouTube videos, and then, once a week, or even multiple times per week, he would meet with three or four other people who were also producing video content. They would compare notes and would talk through what was working well and what wasn’t working well. They would take the next week to implement their learnings, and over time, they ended up more than four X-ing what they would’ve been able to do by themselves and just testing on their own.
So, how could I do that same thing here with Fire US Marketing?
I wanted to start networking with some other digital marketing companies and see if they’re willing to do the same thing where we can get together, we can collaborate, and we can say, what are you doing that’s working, and what are you doing that’s not working? There’s no reason we can’t work together and grow together.
I totally believe that there’s plenty there for everybody, and I don’t think that collaborating with a handful of other agencies is going to hurt my business or their business.
I think we’ll be able to work together and grow twice as fast by using each other’s help, and experience and learning from each other’s mistakes.
So that’s where I’m at right now.
The Beginnings of The Digital Revolution Podcast
How can I take that one step further? And I thought, why don’t we have some of these agencies and some of these other experts that I’m talking to come on a podcast, and we can share those tactics? We can talk about the things that they’re doing that work well.
And if you are a business owner, an in-house SEO, an in-house Marketer, or in-house in any way, if you’re listening to the podcast, you can take some of those lessons and try to implement them in your own career or business.
The Podcast Layout
The layout of the podcast moving forward will have four different sections.
Section 1:
We’re gonna learn about that person. We’re gonna say, okay, who is Eli? Where did he grow up? What did he want to be when he grew up? And how did he get from wanting to be an astronaut all the way over to owning a digital marketing agency?
There’s this whole thing in the middle that I think a lot of us can relate to. There are twists and turns in the road, but there are certain pivots or certain turns, if you will, that made you who you are and made you become what you are now, so I’m hoping the first section, where we learn about that episode’s guest is interesting to you.
Section 2:
Here, we’re gonna learn about what they’re doing right now. What gets them up in the morning? What excites them every single day? What is it that they’re working on that’s sort of a passion project that maybe they can hang their hat on. Things that they’ve recently completed where they can say, “I’m super proud of that.”
Section 3:
The next section is going to be tactical. If you’re an expert in SEO, what are things that you wish you had known in the beginning?
Imagine the podcast listeners are business owners. Maybe a dentist, doctor, lawyer, chiropractor, or something like that, and they’re looking for something to take their business to the next level, but they’re maybe not quite ready to hire an agency or to hire an in-house person. You, as the business owner can listen to this podcast and look at those tactical things and know that if you want to up your digital marketing game, these are some very specific tactics that you can implement online today.
The goal is for you to implement the tactics we discuss on the show into your online business so you can elevate your presence online.
Section 4:
The fourth part will discuss where you see the future going in this digital world.
So again, if we’re talking to somebody about SEO, where do you see the future of SEO going? Is it AR, VR, or the Metaverse? Is it like? Or is it just going to stay kind of the same? It’s just going to grow really slow. And here’s what I’d recommend you do to prepare for the future. Keeping all of that in mind, hopefully, you can hear the passion in my voice.
I already have an amazing lineup ready for you. So far, 15 people have committed to being on the show, and a lot more are in the queue. That means we have at least three months of content ready to go.
I’ll do this as long as I possibly can and as long as you, the audience, want it. But some of the people I have lined up, just trust me, they’re the best of the best. Some of them are in Utah, and some of them are on the East Coast. I even have some lined up that are on the other side of the world in Amsterdam and Malaysia. These people they’re the best in the digital space. You’re not going to want to miss out.
These guests are the best at e-commerce, subscriptions, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, and more. They are also the owners of very successful businesses. I have both male and female guests.
I hope you’re as excited as I am to listen and learn. As the podcast grows, hopefully, we can get some more awesome people to join us.
I am so excited
If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see it in my face. I’m so excited about the Digital Revolution podcast. I’m excited to share tactical strategies in each area of digital. I hope that you guys want to join me on this journey.
Contact Info
Moving forward, you can either find us at firesmarketing.com, where you’ll find a link in the podcast’s navigation, or you can go to DigitalRevolutionPodcast.com, which will redirect you to that same landing page. It should have all the most recent podcasts as well as a link to all of the past podcasts that we’ve had on the show up to that point.
Thank You!
Thanks again for sticking through this whole intro podcast. And I hope that you get some value out of it. I want to make sure that you’re getting something really tangible, not just the fluff.
So, thank you for sticking around. I look forward to connecting with you on social media. You can find me @FireUsMarketing on pretty much every platform, or you can find me personally on LinkedIn @TheRealEliAdams.
Thanks again.
We’ll see you on the next one.
0 Comments