Welcome to your brand amplified, the podcast where we interview marketers, publicists, and

brands to learn their stories, what makes them tick, and tips and tricks that make a difference. I'm Anika Jackson here with another episode of your brand Amplified.

And today we have Aaron Alilla on who has a podcast also

and is an expert at SEO. a

a podcast also and is an expert at SEO. Aaron, please tell us how you got to this part of your journey.

Yeah, that's a great question. My journey has been in some ways a very

straight line, but I think the best way to call it is a very wavy straight line. As a kid,

I knew I wanted to be I wanted to be everything I wanted to be the president I wanted I went to a Catholic school as a child so I also wanted to be a priest which was just a dead end road for me that was not going to happen. I wanted to be an astronaut but the one

constant has always been that I wanted to do teaching and I wanted to be a writer. And that's, you know,

stayed through. I got my undergraduate in English,

language arts. I went to graduate school and got an MFA in creative non-fiction.

And I kind of imagined that I would be teaching university level creative writing.

Like that was the big goal.

But if anyone knows anything about teaching in the college level,

they know that you may be able to easily get in as an adjunct but one adjunct jobs pay nothing they offer no

benefits and you know you kind of hop around a lot to different universities I didn't

want to do that and I decided that I was just going to forge my own way in the

writing world after getting my MFA solely on the fact that I did not know what I would be doing and how I would stay

attached to the writing world. At the time I had been working in human

resources for a long time, over a decade at that time. So I knew I was going back into admin like work. So my friend

from the graduate school and I decided we were just going to start our own literary journal. So we did. We started an online literary journal. We actually just published our 14th issue, maybe two weeks ago, which is fun and it was wonderful. But I just now that I'm older, I look back at that like young Aaron and I think to myself like how cute is that that I just said like oh okay let me just go and start an online literary journal and then I did it right so after some time I realized like I could stay in HR forever but this is not

what I want to do. This is not what I just paid all of that money for and trained for for so long

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