Why I Became a Business Content Creator

People often ask me how I ended up in my current career as a business copywriter, content strategist, and editor. My career path thus far has been nothing short of wild, with more twists and turns than most people expect from someone who’s still under 40 years old.

I’m a prime example of the mantra that there’s no such thing as a typical career trajectory. I strongly believe that my diverse professional background is largely responsible for my success today, as all of my disparate experiences have added up to a uniquely well-rounded skill set. With this in mind, today’s blog veers away from my usual business copywriting and marketing advice columns to examine what brought me here.

Why am I the right person to speak for your brand? What do I have to offer that your typical content creator can’t provide? And, at the end of the day, why should you hire Strandberg Media Services instead of one of our countless competitors?

Passion Seeking an Outlet

For much of my adult life, I’ve had more creative energy than I knew what to do with. In college, I bounced around several different majors, first settling on journalism before ultimately earning a degree in Film & Video Studies. After graduating, I spent a semester pursuing a Master’s Degree in English before entering the workforce.

Through each of these stops, I knew that writing was my passion but struggled to find a program that taught me to write the way I wanted to write. Journalism taught me a lot about how to write efficiently — to produce clear and concise content — but I felt stifled by the lack of room for creativity.

When I chose Film & Video Studies, I elected a writing focus, taking classes that taught me both how to write films and write about them. I learned much about creative writing in those years and developed my penchant for storytelling.

However, I ran into some of the same issues I did with journalism. While I was able to further hone my ability to write efficient copy, the restricting nature of the screenplay medium was a bit of a turn-off. In addition, I learned that a career in the film industry itself didn’t particularly interest me.

My semester-long foray into an English Master’s program took me in the opposite direction. As with Film & Video Studies, English provided me with some highly valuable lessons in storytelling, but I found much of the content I read that semester to be stuffy, pretentious, and often overstuffed. Feeling frustrated and confused, I looked for inspiration anywhere I could find it and wound up in a completely different field than I had studied.

A Decade in the Music Industry

For most of my twenties, I pushed writing to the back burner while pursuing a career playing music. From 2007 to 2016, I recorded three studio albums and played hundreds of concerts as a singer, bassist, and guitarist. Instead of writing words, I was now crafting songs.

During this decade, writing drifted from the front of my mind, but it was never far behind, often running side-by-side with my music career. In 2009, I spent seven months juggling my music career with a full-time position as a copy editor for a marketing firm. In 2013, I started a baseball blog and eventually parlayed its success into a side gig as a staff writer for the baseball website FanGraphs, a role I held for nearly five years.

I also found a way to combine all of my previous pursuits into another part-time job as an arts and entertainment columnist for a local newspaper. From 2014 to 2018, I wrote film reviews and previews, covered the regional arts scene, and wrote long-form Q&A columns with interviewees like Oscar-nominated filmmaker Eric Heisserer, comedian Ron White, broadcasting legend Jim Ross, and Grammy-nominated music producer Wes Sharon.

I enjoyed the work itself, as the A&E niche often has less stringent formal constraints than the journalism field at large. However, the long hours and desperately low pay in the newspaper industry were big turn-offs, and my main focus was still on my music career.

Finding My Calling

2014 was the start of some major changes for me. In addition to starting my newspaper job, this was the year I took my first online freelance blog writing gig on a website called Elance (now known as Upwork). It was also the year I started to doubt my future in the music industry and look more seriously at other opportunities.

I will always love creating and playing music, but making it my career was perhaps never the best idea. In any given band (and I was in quite a few of them!), I was usually the only person with any business sense and almost always the only one willing to put in any effort regarding marketing, scheduling, etc.

Over the years, the business side of the music industry increasingly weighed on me until I was no longer enjoying myself and started to look for a way out. I learned that many people pursue music careers because they don’t want to do anything else. To this day, I know countless individuals in the industry who just want to play guitar and not worry about “real life,” or even recognize that their ability to play guitar for a living hinges on someone else worrying about their real life.

Thankfully, I already had irons in the fire that would lead me to where I am today, ten years later. I significantly ramped up my freelancing business over the next couple of years and finally quit the music industry for good in 2016. By early 2017, I was a full-time business writer with a broad selection of diverse clients and a renewed enthusiasm for my professional life.

Brick by Brick: Building My Own Little Business Empire

Over the next several years, I continued to build up my freelance business, landing contracts with major corporations like Microsoft and Indeed, along with many small businesses. In late 2021, I formed Strandberg Media Services LLC, taking the next step in my career journey.

In some ways, shifting from a freelancer to an LLC owner was a small change. After all, I was still working with most of the same clients, still working from home, etc. However, the LLC allowed me to take some major professional steps that would have been more difficult if I had continued as a freelancing sole proprietor.

I was able to easily hire contractors to help shoulder the load, and even more importantly, I gained a significant amount of professionalism from the LLC structure. I have found that people take businesses more seriously when they’re officially structured with the state — many business owners feel more comfortable and professional writing a check to “Strandberg Media Services LLC” than to “Scott Strandberg.”

Today, Strandberg Media Services is in a sweet spot of having a sustainable amount of work while still being a small and relatively easily manageable business.

What’s next?

I’m always pursuing greater success for this company and seeking new clients to round out our roster. In addition, I spend much of my free time writing in other formats. I recently completed the second draft of my debut sci-fi novel, I’ve written dozens of short stories, and I just started work on a horror screenplay.

I find that writing fiction helps my business writing immensely — any time spent honing my storytelling craft is time well spent. Someday, I hope to transition my fiction writing into a career of its own, but for now, I’m more than happy to use it as a tool for improving my work with Strandberg Media Services LLC.

Telling stories through the written word still excites me and gets me out of bed every morning, and at this point, I’m confident that feeling will never fade away. Whether I ever spin off my fiction writing into a money-maker or not, it’s another crucial element of the well-rounded skill set that got me where I am today.

To truly excel as a business content creator, you have to love what you do and write as much as you can. I feel that business copywriters who don’t follow this advice stick out like sore thumbs — it’s always easy to spot content written by someone with no passion for their craft.

As I continue to grow Strandberg Media Services LLC into the business of my dreams, my focus will never change: I want to tell the story of your brand in a way that drives readers to act. Turning clicks into conversions is my forte — simply click the “Contact” button on your screen to learn more about how I can put my unique skill set to work for your company!