You are living proof, Paula! Neat path you took from sales and marketing to TV to dogs to … (what’s next, I wonder?)…. 🙂

Way back when I first started out, I landed an ongoing freelance gig with a sales and marketing business publication. It was a good training ground since it had sections on sales, advertising, marketing, promotions, incentives, management, technology, etc…That gave me clips in several sub-niches. A kind-hearted publicist put me in touch with an editor at Ad Age who was looking for freelancers to work on special reports. I sent him some of my advertising and marketing related clips, and he assigned me several things, most of which involved TV ad sales. From TV ad sales, I was able to piggyback myself into writing for entertainment trades.

I also sent clips from the incentives section of that first magazine to Incentive magazine, and wound up with a couple of assignments there. An Incentive article about luring top employees with a pet-friendly workplace piggybacked on both the first magazine and some of the TV trades while incorporating my love of dogs, because one of the businesses I profiled was the production offices of one of my favorite TV shows (the casting director said her large dog was often heard snoring in the background of audition tapes). I used that article to land a couple of assignments about dogs.

One thing truly can lead to the next.