Today, we have got the chance to interview one of the best Internet consultants, Jim Galiano. He has been running a digital development, marketing and consulting agency since 1997. He has got a vast experience of working with digital businesses besides he helped them in creating a strong online presence. Let’s read this interview that covers his personal and professional journey!
Cloudways: Hi Jim, thanks for this interview. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers? How did you start your career? What was the driving force that led you to choose your career? What would you become if you are not an internet consultant? 😉
Jim: Sure. I had my very first experience with a real-world digital agency – way back in 1988. I was very young at the time and didn’t enjoy the experience overall, even though I learned quite a bit. I found the work and the overall atmosphere to be very stressful and uninspiring. There were constant deadlines and I almost immediately regretted my career choice. I felt like the job was taking a lot more than it was giving.
Fortunately, my father was an entrepreneur as was his father before him – going all the way back to my great-grandfather. I had the entrepreneurial spirit in me right from the beginning. My grandfather was a hall-of-fame boxing trainer who worked a boxer who went on to become the oldest Heavyweight Champion of the World (at the time). When I was a kid, he introduced me to him and many other legendary fighters. They all advised me to stay in school and NOT be like them. All that to say – it was then that I began to understand the correlation between fighting and facing the challenges of life that everyone faces.
When I left my original agency job – that’s when my entrepreneurial sprung to life, and nothing was ever the same again. Was it hard? Yes! But I learned to enjoy each step of the journey because life isn’t just what happens to us. It’s about how we respond to these events.
If I hadn’t become a consultant (which is my business version of the boxing trainer and strategist), I’d be writing books (business and inspirational) and doing another form of eCommerce.
Cloudways: You are running Gulf Coast Internet Publishing, a digital development, marketing and consulting agency for more than 23 years. How did you manage to remain in the same field? 😉 What are the significant changes you have seen?
Jim: The field has changed so much, the only thing that really remains from my original business structure is the name. And even that has taken a back seat to the building of a personal brand. People will always buy services, but the services themselves always change with time. Originally, agencies didn’t build or publish with WordPress. We used other solutions before the “Content Management Systems” were created.
WordPress was a game-changer for the industry. That said, if something better came along, we’d all eventually adapt and switch over to that. That’s just the nature of change.
The X-Factor, however, comes down to the individual. If you’re mentally stuck in the past, you make decisions based on what was instead of “what is”. If you’re selling services, you have to adapt to what’s happening in the present. That’s why many business models no longer work as well as they once did in the online space.
The most significant change I’ve seen (tech aside) is how fast people burn out these days. As a whole, more people seem mentally exhausted today than they have in the past. Business as a whole has been over complicated. In the past, people built huge companies with 1/20th of the data that’s available today. Too many things have been over complicated.
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Cloudways: You have been helping brands all over the world to increase their digital footprint effectively. What do you think are the essential elements of successful marketing campaigns? What are the tips you would like to share with people who are just starting their careers?
Jim: I used to put more emphasis on marketing “tools” than I do today. Over time I’ve learned that it really starts with the product. You have to test the idea first on a smaller scale and see how people respond to it. The marketplace votes yes or no on products all the time. I’m not talking about surveys, I’m talking about voting with their wallets. You just don’t know until you get something out there.
For example, if something sells well in a social media group, then you can launch a paid advertising campaign. You just have to make sure the ad copy and ad image(s) that are present on the ad are also present on the sales page. Once something gets a positive response (people buying on a small scale), then you can use all the other tools and techniques to scale it up.
If you don’t have a winner on a smaller scale, exposing it to a large group of people won’t transform the campaign into a winner. It’s like a world-class athlete. They’ll perform well locally in their hometown… and they’ll carry that ability onto the world stage. If they’re not so good locally, moving onto a bigger stage will only magnify that.
So, it all comes down to getting behind the winners and dropping the losers. That applies to your own products as well as your client’s products. Some products have shorter lifespans than others. They do well for a few years and then the marketplace wants to move on to other things. In that respect, you have limited control over what happens next – so you don’t want to be emotionally connected to a product.
Let me add to all that by saying – we’re now it the era of the personal brand. With this approach to marketing, the individual is in many ways – a product. Their platform and content can attract the attention of large communities of people. If you’re just getting started online, I would recommend that you start building your personal brand as soon as possible.
Building your own platform is something that can serve you for years to come. If possible, buy yourname.com, .net, .me (whatever you can get your hands on) and get started. Products, services, books, courses, etc. – all these things will come and go, but your personal brand can is more likely to stand the test of time.
Cloudways: Would you like to tell our readers some of the best projects you’ve worked on? What are the practices and workflow you choose to deliver your best? How did you cope up with the challenges in your professional career?
Jim: I’ve worked on some really big national marketing campaigns where we had lists of all the top news shows, media, blogs, TV stations across the country. So we’d roll out a marketing campaign in New York, Los Angeles, Orlando, Chicago, Baltimore, Phoenix, Dallas and more… all on the same day. These campaigns were for new companies launching across the nation.
Once, I rolled out a media release announcing the death of a famous athlete here in the US. The only thing was, he wasn’t dead yet. He had a stroke, and the publicity people on his end send me the death notice while he was still alive. What a mess that was. He did, unfortunately, pass away a few days later.
I was involved in political campaigns for the governor and the senate. Looking back, it sounds a lot better now than it did at the time. The moments of glory and fame come and go.
When it comes to challenges, correcting mistakes and things like that, it’s always easy to get caught up in the moment and the flood of emotions that come with it. The truth is, very few things are of life and death importance. We’ll make mistakes, miss opportunities, etc.
As I’ve gone through the years, I’ve tried to keep hyper-aware of what I had instead of what was missing. And from a spiritual side, I try to do the best I can and just leave it God’s hands from there. In the past, I’d worry about things I had no control over. My mind would always take me in the direction of worst-case scenarios. That, of course, can make things miserable because you’re living through a problem (mentally) before it happens.
Today, I practice doing the opposite. I practice thinking about good, uplifting things instead. And honestly, you have to commit to doing that because the temptation to imagine the worst is usually there, too.
I try to keep my workflows very simple. Having fewer moving parts enables me to be consistently persistent for prolonged periods of time. Consistency is a critical component when it comes to success.
Cloudways: The Jim Galiano podcast has been doing great for digital business owners. From where you did get the inspiration to run your own podcast? Could you please name some of the guests that really help you reshaped your approach?
Jim: Nathan and David from the WPBuilds podcast inspired me to start my own podcast back in 2017. Back before they did the interview format, they simply shared thoughts about a topic with one another for 45-minutes or so. It was a natural, flowing conversation that wasn’t overhyped or overproduced. I really liked that style, so I decided to do something similar. The only difference was – I would be talking directly to the listeners.
Years ago, I did a lot of public speaking. So I was comfortable not having someone to bounce ideas off of. I’ve only done one interview since 2017, and that was with the marketing guys from moosend.com. I really enjoyed talking to them about email marketing. I’ve been using their service for about a year.
Cloudways: It was surprising for me to know that you’ve written books about spirituality and connected them with real-life experiences. That’s really quite impressive! What was your inspiration behind it and how was your experience? Can I call those books autobiographical? 🙂
Jim: Yes! Actually, as a kid, my mother took me to church. I got so bored with it all, she gave up. Truth be told, she was bored with it as well. Years later I started reading about people who were miraculously healed of cancer after being prayed for. My girlfriend was one of those people. She had cancer that had advanced to stage four. The doctors couldn’t do anything else for her. Then, a group of Christian people prayed for her and it disappeared. The doctors were baffled. They did tests but couldn’t find cancer. Just like that, it was gone.
Since then (I was 21 years old at the time), I’ve had all kinds of great experiences along these lines. I’ve written about some of them to encourage people who are weighed down by the tests and trials of life.
Cloudways: As a web development consultant, what type of hosting and application(s) you do usually recommend to your clients? What are your thoughts about CMSs like WordPress and serverless computing? Do they have the potential to change the trend?
Jim: It really depends on the client. The client can’t “see” Webhosting they way they would small, medium and large products sitting on a table. You have to describe it to them in ways that make it easier for them to grasp. Less vs. more. Faster vs. slower. Bigger vs. smaller. Stronger vs. weaker.
From there, you can sell the concept of VPS vs. Shared Hosting a lot easier.
I’m a big fan of WordPress. Sometimes I worry that it tries to be too many things to too many people, but that’s a conversation for another day. I moved my personal site (jimgaliano.com) to Cloudways about a year ago. I wanted to explore the whole VPS movement firsthand.
It’s been a great experience. Being able to run certain apps (like Sendy) smoothly and having the extra resources is such a big plus. A few months back, I launched a course. Before the launch, I upgraded to a 2-Core server. It handled all the extra traffic, sales and students without any issues. The cost of running this would have been very expensive in the past. Especially when you consider the time, energy and effort to manage the server. Having Cloudways managing the server saves my company time and money. Not to mention the stress that occasionally comes with that territory.
Cloudways: Our readers would be happy to see your workstation. Could you please share an image of that? Thanks once again for this interview.
Jim: Sure. Thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed our conversation!
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
