Learn from our community entrepreneurs! In this interview, Ed Latimore shares the story of building and growing Ed Latimore, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
Hi! Tell us about your business and what problem are you solving?
I’m Ed Latimore and I’m a writer who focuses on overcoming addictions, dealing with trauma, and developing practical applications of stoicism and forgiveness to improve the relationship you have with yourself and others.
My website is edlatimore.com and is broken down into five categories: Mental mastery, physical mastery, emotional mastery, money skills, and addiction & sobriety. To supplement the free information on my site, I have a variety of books and courses to help people develop in these areas as well.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I grew up extremely poor in public housing projects, but I managed to move out when I was 18 and I’ve never been back. I spent most of my 20s doing two things: drinking to excess and boxing. The former almost destroy my potential to go far in the latter, however, I eventually quit for good on December 23rd, 2013. Recovered addicts never forget their sobriety date.
Drinking was my “keystone habit”. Once I knocked that one out, the rest followed. Now I could focus on being an even better fighter, writer, and eventually earn my degree in Physics. During this time, I had been writing about all aspects of my life and journey on my website.
I’ve always wanted to have a blog and be a writer, but I had trouble finding my “voice”. As a result, the blogs never quite took off or I lost interest. The thing that made this blog stick is that I found my voice—writing about what I’d learned the hard way with the intention of making sure that other people could learn it the easy way.
Because I’d overcome so many challenges (grew up in poverty, struggled and overcame alcoholism, won national titles as an amateur boxer, boxed professionally, and earned a physics degree to name few things), I believed that my perspective was authentic and that I could help many people with it.
How do you motivate yourself to keep going every day?
Today things are going very well from the revenue and social media side, but I have hit a small snag in the search engine traffic. However, these things are bound to happen when you rely solely on organic traffic, as Google is always modifying its algorithm. This just means that we have to adapt on our side and create even better content.
My goals for the future are to get the site to making $50,000/mo passively, as well as doing 100k visits/mo from organic traffic. I believe the best way to reach these goals is to continue to provide useful content that is both optimized for the search engines and serves my audience.
What’s your one biggest challenge you face and how do you overcome it?
I’m fortunate in that I’m involved in content creation, so it’s difficult to make mistakes, per se. The one thing I wish I had more of is to promote my products more aggressively.
My email list is probably half the size that it could be today because I did not do the work of heavy promotion early on. I’ve easily left six figures of revenue on the table because I did not promote as heavily.
The big thing I’ve learned is that if you’re in business for yourself, you live and die by promotion and marketing. One of the big changes I’ve made recently is that I promote my content much more heavily now than I ever have before. This has resulted in more sales, signs ups, and visitors. All of those are excellent outcomes for my brand.
To anyone looking to start or grow a business today, what three tips would you give them?
I’ve relied on a mixture of strategies to grow my website and brand. First, I’ve embraced social media and I’m extremely active there. This has given me a large audience to share my content and has made it easier for people to discover my content as well.
Growing a large social media presence has made every other part of marketing easier. I can grow my mailing list from social media, run sales from social media, and drive traffic to my website from social media.
The one thing that social media is not a great help on is driving organic search traffic to my website. To tackle this problem, I’ve invested heavily in my website to make it as appealing and technically sound as possible.
To supplement the technical design of my website, I’ve learned about creating high-quality SEO content that both the search engines and people enjoy. This makes it easier to rank for keywords that drive traffic to my site and this helps expose me to more fans and customers.