I was swimming the other day here on Skyros Island with friends and family. As I joined the conversation, there was a new guy talking with the others. Since we were just bodiless heads sticking out of the sea and I was facing the sun, I was struggling to make out what he looked like, in case I did know him.
"He’s probably a friend of theirs whom I haven’t met," I thought to myself. Just as my brother-in-law was about to introduce us, this new friend looks at me and asks:
“You’re a YouTuber, right?”
Obviously, I was surprised. Hah, is that good or bad? How do they know I’m making silly, inconsistent videos on YouTube? And have I reached the point where I can add that label to my profile?
He could tell I didn’t expect that.
“No worries, I’m a digital marketer myself,” he continued as I was having trouble finding the right words to answer his question.
Ok, now we can cut to the chase since I knew he understood the lingo and the shenanigans of working online.
Sure, I was happy to call myself a YouTuber, among all the other things I’ve been calling myself. I wouldn’t say it’s my full-time job. But given how much time I’m spending on this craft, I might as well get the credit of calling myself a middle-aged YouTuber.
“Well, yes,” I said, “I do make videos on YouTube,” to which he responded:
“Investing and the like, right?”
Oh boy, now we’re talking.
At first, I thought he’d come across my videos about Skyros since we were on this beautiful Greek island. People visiting the island might have searched YouTube for videos, and there’s a chance he landed on one of my Skyros videos. But investing? That’s the first niche you associate with me? That means you’ve watched more than one video of mine and have dug deeper into my background.
On hearing the word “investing,” my brother-in-law and friends quickly went the other way, laughing.
“Investing? You two talk to each other, we’ll stick to fishing stories!”
I totally get it. Investing, making money, and gambling all have a strange aura around them. No wonder these are called grey markets in SEO, as most scams run in these industries and people don’t feel comfortable talking about money.
Thankfully, this digital marketer is actually an active SEO advisor, which made me open up way quicker than if I were explaining what I do for a living to my grandma (if she were still alive).
It turns out this guy has been freelancing as an SEO expert for popular gambling operators in Greece, after starting out as a web designer following his studies as a mathematician. Due to his partnerships with these companies, we had more common ground to connect and totally clicked. Well, at least, that’s how I felt—I hope he did too!
We spent the following hour discussing gambling, cryptocurrencies, and how SEO is changing due to Artificial Intelligence, to the point where he might fall back to web design if things get much worse. We shared that sentiment about how the internet is changing and what it means for our line of work, as I am also shifting my career toward building my personal brand, instead of living as a lazy, fully dependent on Google, living-under-the-radar, semi-retired web publisher.
He wasn’t a family friend, though. I was totally wrong about that. He ended up with us because his little daughter had met our friends’ kids and was having fun playing together at the beach. As a family man, you go where your kids go.
We could have talked for hours, but time flies, and we had to go back home. We said our goodbyes and set a date for the next day to meet at the same beach, as we obviously had a lot more to talk about—and our kids to play with. But he was in his last days of vacationing on the island, so I figured we might not run into each other, as he would likely want to spend more time with his family instead of with a total stranger.
“We’ll talk online,” he said as we were leaving. “Sure, we’ll meet in the digital world,” I replied, realizing I hadn’t asked for any of his contact details—typical introverted Jim. Well, he knows my YouTube channel, so that’s a point of contact, I figured.
The very next morning, as I was watering the plants, I got a notification. It was him, texting me on Instagram at 7 a.m.! He had been following me there for God knows how long, so I could run a background check on his profile—not that I needed to, as I trusted the guy. But as a content creator, you often check your new followers’ profiles, especially when you’re just a small fish in a giant pond like me. Here I had a few more reasons to do that. After all, we seemed to have a lot in common.
We texted back and forth for a few minutes, but unfortunately, we didn’t meet again before he and his family left the island. But they’ll be back, and surprisingly, we’ll become neighbors soon enough as they are building their summer house close to ours! They first visited Skyros Island in 2014 and have been coming here every summer since then. That’s a VERY common story I’ve heard over the years from quite a few people who have visited this island in Greece. Of course, not everyone decides to build a house here, but it surely makes people reconsider their way of living and life choices. I certainly have, as I’ve talked about in my YouTube videos. After all, I AM a YouTuber!
