Welcome to my site, I hope you’re doing great! You’re probably wondering who this Jon Goodman guy is and why am I reading (and hopefully loving) his material so much.
Let’s just say I’ve always been one to fly by the seat of my pants. My parents will attest my admittance that I’ve never responded well to authority and, as a result, I’ve never worked for anybody else. At 26 I’ve lived an amazing life having travelled extensively, met and worked with amazing people, and recently quit my personal training job to live and work remotely in Hawaii. I didn’t do this because I hated my job. I actually loved it. I did this because I wanted to reach as many people as possible. Currently I own and operate thePTDC.com and MightyTrainer.com and consult with GirlsGoneStrong.
My first career was personal training and it allowed me to be responsible for my own business. By 23 I found myself being promoted to senior trainer and was made responsible for the hiring and training of 10+ trainers. Frustrated by the lack of quality resources I set out to write Ignite the Fire: The Secrets to Building a Successful Personal Training Career. It was a 2.5 year journey and the end result was better then anything I had ever dreamed. Thus far the book has been bought by over 2000 personal trainers on every continent but Antarctica and is being used in college programs across North America.
The book led me to create the World’s first collaborative blogging resource for personal trainers, thePTDC.com. Since the websites development I’ve delved deep into the rabbit hole of the social media landscape and internet marketing world.
Only recently I’ve realized how odd my experimentations and observations are. For better or for worse I’ve always preferred to develop my own theories as opposed to following others. My home is full of notebooks that detail my observations. Some of the weird things I do are:
- Take meticulous notes on conversations. Since high school I have been sitting at home and writing notes on every conversation. Stuff like how the talk got from point A to B and C and how I could have better gotten my message across.
- Sit in coffee shops and write imaginary stories about everybody in them. I also sit in public places and play a game where I try to recreate the scene using as few words and symbols as possible.
- I document my experiences with customer service and management. Whether it’s somewhere that i work or an establishment I’m at I’ve always taken notes on the interactions and why they were positive or negative. Either way my aim is to take something from every interaction.
- Social media. For the last 2 years I have watched social media feeds like a hawk. I have become obsessed with messages. Hours on end I will sit with a notebook and take notes on why certain blog posts, status updates, pictures, or memes are shared and why others aren’t. When something gains traction in the feed I won’t sleep until I figure out why. From this I have built a theory that I believe is powerful enough to change the social media landscape.
The theory gets deep into the conscious and unconscious reasons why people share. It doesn’t matter how many “likes” are on your Facebook page or how many followers you have on Twitter. Many seem to be obsessed with mastering the software. I’m more interested in the end user and how to manipulate them to use whatever software they have with you in mind.
What does matter is knowing why people hit a share button. Once you know why people use social media the job is to create, package, and market your content to make it more sharable. This is what I speak about in my second book, Race to the Top: How to Take Over the Social Media Feed.
So dig in and enjoy. Always feel free to email me at jonathan@theptdc.com, just please keep your correspondance to 5 sentences or less. That which cannot be said succinctly is not fully understood.
