Marcia the Master Marketer Talks Freelancing, Writing, and World Travel

Marcia, who is an introvert, hiding within a plant

Dr. Marcia Yudkin, a self-made marketing expert, has worked remotely her entire career. She lives where she wishes. You’ll learn about how it’s done right and Marcia’s trips to the Hawaiian Islands and Chinese mainland.

Bearing a trio of Ivy League degrees, with a clear, comfortable career as an academic ahead, you left the Ivory Tower for a freelancer’s life. Why?

I went to graduate school to learn more, not with an eye on a college teaching career. After I finished my Ph.D. degree, I taught for two years at a prestigious liberal arts college. The first year I enjoyed the challenge. However, if I looked ahead, I did not feel good about the prospect of teaching much the same courses for the rest of my life.

I had also listened in on the worries and concerns of colleagues who were up for their tenure decision, and I didn’t relish the prospect of being judged not only on the quality of my teaching and scholarship but also on who I was. I preferred a freer life, and for 35 years I have been fully in charge of my life and career decisions. I have no regrets!

A master marketer who has published seventeen books – including The Marketing Attitude, available free of charge – you understand how to market. How might solo beginners promote their work?

I don’t believe in “shoulds.” There are dozens of marketing options, and someone should choose promotional methods according to how well they fit with their personality and talents. Some people blog or start a podcast, others go out and speak in the community and others network.

Marketing Minute, your email newsletter sent to subscribers every Wednesday, highlights a pertinent topic in bite-size form. They love it. Where does your inspiration come from?

I read a lot, and monitor a lot of business-related discussions. Topics for my Marketing Minute have come from my reading, from coaching sessions with clients, from seeing people ask mixed-up questions or from noting an innovative marketing move. Sometimes inspiration comes from billboards I see as I travel or from a local newspaper article I read at a motel. Everything goes into the hopper.

Because of the location freedom afforded by your occupation, you’re able to split time between New England and Maui, Hawaii, while also traveling elsewhere. When did you grasp that you could?

I have actually experienced location independence and had a virtual business from the very beginning. When I earned most of my money from writing articles and books, I rarely met any editors (my clients) in person. We carried on business through mail and telephone. So I could have lived anywhere.

With that said, I did have a lot more business-related opportunities during the 17 years I lived in Boston. I met people engaged in occupations and projects I would never have encountered in the small country towns where I lived before and after that. The big-city consulting projects I landed greatly broadened my knowledge and understanding of the work world.

I am fortunate to be able to live now in places that are conducive to my favorite activities. When I am in Western Massachusetts, I can run or walk five miles a day hardly seeing another person or car. When I am in Maui, I have a gorgeous, uncrowded swimming beach manned by lifeguards a one-minute walk from our door.

All this peace and freedom, though, is a result of choices I have made and a lot of disciplined, hard work.

At a period when People’s Republic of China began welcoming Westerners, you went to work at Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press via a year-long University of Massachusetts exchange program. That must have been an experience! What was discovered about Chinese culture?

That year was non-stop adventure. I began learning Chinese as soon as I found out I’d be going to China, and I did my best to step out of the cocoons created for Western visitors at that time. A French friend and I traveled by “hard seat” on trains every chance we could, eating the local food, seeing the country’s antiquities and natural wonders and interacting with ordinary Chinese.

In many places we were the first Europeans people had ever seen, and kids everywhere would point us out to their parents. “Waiguo ren!” “Foreigners!” It got to be a strain being so conspicuous all the time, even in the capital.

Food was another hardship. At that time, there was no infrastructure to ship fresh vegetables from the south to the north, so in winter only vegetables that had been stored up from the fall harvest were available – at any price. Daily meals in Beijing were rice, cabbage and pork, rice, cabbage and pork, rice, cabbage and pork, with occasional cauliflower and carrots or dumplings instead of rice. We paid for meals with ration tickets as well as money. People put fistfuls of MSG into the food when they cooked, which gave me severe insomnia. Acupuncture helped tremendously with that problem.

Last year [2015] I went back to China for the first time in more than 30 years. It was amazing to see the modernization that had taken place in a single generation, both in the cities and in the countryside. In Beijing, the standard of living of educated people is now quite comparable to ours in the U.S. In the countryside, some people we visited had attractive houses with big-screen TVs, video games and smartphones but latrines outdoors, next to their pig pens. Fortunately, MSG is no longer as popular when people cook.

Biography

The Marketing Minute newsletter “originated as the written version of a one-minute weekly spot for a TV show seen on WABU TV in Boston and other New England stations (source).”

Books (partial)

Subscribe to Marcia’s Marketing Minute, a free weekly email newsletter. You’ll receive a digital copy of The Marketing Attitude as a gift.

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Want to dive deeper into the art of globetrotting? See our interviews with travel writer Dan Schlossberg, “Air Genius” Gary Leff, and journalist Lawrence Reed.