Eric Siu argues the best way to land a marketing job is to work for free first. He shares examples: an intern who wrote an 8,000-word blog post unpaid and now works for Gary Vaynerchuk, and Siu himself who went from unpaid intern at Snack Nation to VP of Marketing and co-owner as the company grew to $20-30 million in revenue.
In this video, we are going to talk about the number one hack to get a marketing job. But before we do, if you love marketing, you love business, you love entrepreneurship, don't forget to subscribe, whatever platform you are on right now. So the number one hack to get the marketing job of your dreams, guess what, is to do work for free. Oh my God, Eric, I don't want to do work for free. You should never do work for free. But you should. You know why? Because some of the best people I've hired, some of the work I've done in the beginning was doing work for free. When I worked for a company, now called Snack Nation, they do over $20, $25 million a year, maybe over $30 million a year. They were doing $0 million a year. In fact, they were doing $0 in the very beginning. So they hired an army of interns. They hired 12 or 13 of us and we went through this rigorous process and, you know, I did work for them for, for, for, for 3 months and they gave me a lot of training and I was very grateful for that. That's the difference. I was grateful for that because I got to learn. And, um, you know, after that I learned to make the most of the skills that I gained and I learned to parlay that into a full-time job and then into another full-time. I basically changed 5 jobs in the first year. A year into it, it led me into like an SEO strategist role. And then I became a VP of marketing on the next year, which is more, I was probably more of like head of director level, but I had that title. And then the next year after that, that led to me going into company, becoming a number 2, and then eventually I took over that company. So in a span of, let's just call it 2, 3 years, I went from interning to eventually taking over a company, right? So that's the trajectory you can expect if you do work for freedom again and you're humble about it because when you come into something, And you think you're entitled just because you graduated from school. Like I graduated and you know, the best job I could get was a job that paid me $32,000 a year doing data entry. Um, and that building's 10 minutes away from here in downtown LA. You know, if you can suck it up, do the work, eventually people are going to notice you and you're going to do amazing things. I have another guy who now works for Gary Vaynerchuk. Um, he, what he did first was he wrote me an 8,000-word blog post. He didn't have to do that and there's a lot of value in that blog post. That he did for free. I have another guy who checks checks out this channel quite a bit, Manav. He worked for free for a month, and now he's actually on a paid engagement with us. You know, he showed up to every single one of my live videos, no matter what time it was coming in from India. Might have been like one a.m. or two a.m. for him, but he showed up every single time. Very enthusiastic, good communicator, and you do stuff like that, and you're going to be able to take your career to the next level. I even think about Neil. Neil Patel, my podcast co-host, he had a guy that basically managed his, um, his courses for the longest time, Vignesh. And Vignesh actually turned out to be very talented and he worked for free for a while and then it became a paid engagement. So that's how you get the job of your dreams, working for free initially, sucking it up, being humble about it. And then, um, you know, you can get the marketing job of your dreams or any job for that matter because people are going to notice you. Actually, I'll give you another story right now. There's a guy I met. Um, his name is Dan Quiggle. He basically got to work for Ronald Reagan when he was, I think when he was 19 years old. And I don't think he was getting paid a lot of money. Um, but he did it for the experience and then eventually became, he became, you know, he got to know Ronald Reagan fairly well. Freaking president of the United States, right? That goes a long way. Have the humility in the beginning, be willing to do the things that other people aren't willing to do to get to other places that people can't get to because you did the things that other people don't want to do. So let me know what you think in the comments, what kind of job you are looking to apply for. Maybe you're even looking to work for, you know, one of the companies that we have. Who knows? Leave it in the comments. And also, whatever platform you are on, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe because it helps us grow, helps you grow as well. And don't forget to check out the next clip to keep growing, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
