How to Manage Leadership Stress Using C.B.T.?

Madhav Motivation

For the last couple of years, I’ve been in leadership positions at a bunch of companies. In my work, marketing is high stakes. Marketing is directly responsible for new business (due to a product-led business model). It can get stressful.

For the last year or so, I’ve hired a mental health coach to manage my stress at work. One of my biggest learnings in a leadership role is that your mindset is everything. To be a great leader, you need the right mindset.

Now I’m not going to tell you today how to think like a leader. Plenty of people have already written about that. I’m going to talk about reframing your current thoughts and improving your mindset as a leader. This is based on my own experiences.

I’ll talk about three cognitive distortions commonly found among leaders.

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12 things I learnt as Head of Marketing

Madhav Experiences, Personal

Let’s address the elephant in the room: It’s not easy being a leadership executive.

I’ve faced that first hand while leading multiple marketing teams in the past. During my sabbatical, I reflected on some key learnings during my leadership stints and decided to share the top learnings that I wish someone would’ve told me at the start of my career as a leader.

A majority of these learnings apply to anyone in a high-performance role. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, out of ideas, or feeling directionless, I hope these lessons give you some direction and motivation.

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4 podcasting tips from Andrew Michael (host of Churn.fm)

Madhav Podcast

I chatted with Andrew about his journey with his podcast Churn.fm – how he started it, operations behind every episode and how he manages to publish an episode every Wednesday without fail (despite having a full time job + family life + new startup). If you’re thinking of building a podcast, I’d urge to listen to it.

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How to manage & spend your SEO budget? (feat. Steve Toth)

Madhav Podcast, Strategy

#1: Define your problem statement

Like they say, knowing what the problem is 50% solution. Take out a piece of paper and define the current situation of SEO, what your goals are and the time period in which you’d like to achieve these goals. List out current challenges that prevent you from reaching those goals.

Writing this out will give you a good clarity on what needs to be done.

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Rand Fishkin’s advice on marketing flywheels

Madhav Podcast

In this special episode, I got Rand Fishkin (founder of Sparktoro & Moz) who is about to complete two decades in marketing. I am particularly excited to release this episode because I’ve learnt SO MUCH from his Whiteboard Fridays over the years. For reference:

  1. Rand’s Brandwagon interview (the story behind Whiteboard Fridays)
  2. How to build a content-keyword map (my favorite Whiteboard Friday)

I thought I’d get his perspective on marketing flywheels, why marketing teams should focus on that and how he’s building a marketing flywheel to grow Sparktoro (his newest venture).

You can watch the interview below…

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How to hire A+ remote marketers?

Madhav Operations

I get this question a lot:

I replied – The key is to market the job at the right places, making the job description as broad as you can, focusing on candidates with previous remote work experience & listing the right kind of job perks.

BUT it’s definitely hard to hire A+ talent for your team, especially if it’s a remote marketing team. Here is a running list of unique tactics to find your next top 1% remote employee.

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Tips from a senior affiliate marketer on creating an affiliate program

Madhav Podcast

I talked to Wesley Whetten who is a remote affiliate manager at Liquid Web and has worked with multiple affiliate partners to ensure they get the maximum revenue out of their affiliate partnerships.

In this episode of Remote Marketing Podcast, we talked about the foundational basics of affiliate marketing – when does it make sense, best practices, what pitfalls to avoid and how to create affiliate programs. I also asked him if a good affiliate program can be set up and managed by a remote marketing team.

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