When I was young, my mom wanted to move to Hawaii and told me I would be responsible for the bills, so I started my career in sales. After being in the industry for a few years, I realized that income was heavily contingent on a person’s mood and how they felt on that particular day, so I looked for a way to transfer the skills I had acquired into something more sustainable for long term growth.Marketing seemed like the perfect fit. But learning it was difficult. Textbooks mostly spoke about theory, but a lot of what they taught wasn’t really applicable in real life. I took a few jobs at some underfunded startups to put what I learned to the test, and while I did okay, they went under due to other operational challenges.I gave up for a while and took a job with an automotive manufacturer, but through the four years I was there, I wasn’t offered a single promotion or raise, even though my stats were 2-3x higher than the second top performer in the department. While there, I studied marketing relentlessly from every resource available, went back to school and tried to implement what I learned on myself.Marketing myself led to over 10 million reads on my content and 500,000 social media followers.In that time, I wrote for Inc. Magazine for a while and then took on a highly visible position at the largest employer in Southern California in a brand new role. My boss asked me to create an extensive digital marketing strategy when I was onboarded, so I spoke to every stakeholder across departments that I could and relentlessly researched our competitors. This led to a content marketing and demand generation strategy that encompassed our multiple service lines, physicians and procedures. When it comes to metrics, I was able to achieve extraordinary marketing results for the academic medical center I worked with for four years, outperforming not only our $13 million agency we worked with, but our competitors as well.Digital strategy, SEO, content marketing, demand generation, social media, product marketing, copywriting, building landing pages, email marketing, media buying and digital advertising are all skills I have come to excel at.I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to share my insights in my book with McGraw-Hill Business, along with an MBA Community Marketing program in Brazil and on multiple stages. I’ve been blessed with over 300 media features, which include Fortune, Fast Company, CMO, Forbes, CNBC, Fox Business and more.So what is the #1 factor when it comes to expanding a brand’s reputation and driving revenue?Quality content.