Rai Cornell - DE

Are you fed up with the corporate bullshit holding you back? Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The ultimate launchpad for entrepreneurs ready to seize control and unleash their creative genius. Hosted by Phil Better, the podcast mogul. Each week he's breaking the chains of conventional work with bold strategies, raw insights, and inspiring success stories from the digital entrepreneurs who took the risk and invested in themselves. This is your call to arms. Invest in yourself, break free from someone else's rules and build the empire you deserve. Now let's dive head first into today's explosive episode.

Welcome back to another game changing episode of Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I'm the podcast mogul Phil Better. And today, we're tackling the world's world of marketing with a true visionary who's redefining how businesses attract and connect with their ideal client. Our guest today is the brilliant CEO and strategic marketing consultant behind Cornell Content Marketing, a company that is helping b two b businesses rise above the noise to become true thought leaders in their industries. Forget the short term manipulative tactics like ads. This expert specializes in creating long term psychological driven demand generating strategies that attract prequalified, emotionally engaged buyers. By blending the science of psychology with the art of marketing, our guest is transforming the way businesses build trust, foster loyalty, and achieve sustainable growth. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, this is your chance to learn how to take your marketing and your mindset to the next level.

So please welcome the incredible Ria Cornell to the show. Ria, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.

I'm excited to have you. I love marketers, especially people who are doing stuff differently than average marketers, because I feel podcast is, just marketing on a super scale. But we won't tell anybody the secret of that. We're gonna talk about your secrets and your amazing story. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. But my main question is why? Why did you decide to become a digital entrepreneur and not, you know, just a nine to five grinder?

Yeah. My journey to becoming an entrepreneur is kinda like how chocolate chip cookies were made. It was a total accident. I actually became a freelance writer out of necessity. So when I was very young, my childhood, my upbringing was very rough. I came from a household where there was a lot of violence. I was raised by police officers, and that kinda crept into our house. And so being I don't know.

Just the personality that I am, you know, my team of woo woo creatives on my team would blame it on me being a super uber duper Capricorn, but I am just all about the work. I love to work. When I was a kid, I loved putting together I mean, like, third grade, fourth grade. I would put together my schedule for the week of when I was gonna do my homework. I was that organized. And so my escape was work. I taught, children at the local library who were Spanish speakers. I taught them how to read and write in English.

I was a soccer referee. I was a math tutor. I did all the things. I worked at a, a Starbucks and a local coffee shop. When I went to college, I had the full intention of getting my bachelor's degree, master's degree. I wanted to go on and be a counselor in the prison system. And when I was in college, I was physically assaulted on campus, and I developed horrible PTSD to the point where I could not even leave my dorm room. And so the jobs that I accumulated on campus, I was a math grader.

I worked in seven different offices on campus doing website content and web development. I couldn't keep them. I just I completely failed at being an employee. And so I stayed in my dorm room, and I turned to Google, and I typed in how to make a living writing. And that's what I ended up developing skills in because I knew I was always a good writer. In school, I would so much rather have an essay as an assignment than have to do a presentation. And so writing, I knew that was easy for me. It came naturally.

I always got a's on my papers, and that's where I started to just survive financially. And that eventually grew into something that I never could have expected.

Yeah. Wow. I it's interesting because you you took something that is debilitating, I'm gonna say. Like, it's it's an assault. You're you're physically assaulted, mentally assaulted as well because you you have this PTSD. And you turned it into a life changing because it is a life changing event. So not only you turned it into a positive life changing event even though it's a very negative situation. And I I I I'm I wanna say I'm glad that it happened, but I'm happy that the path it brought you was a positive path, because it was able to, you know, foster this entrepreneurial spirit in you, grow to where you are today, where you're helping others, from the freelance writing gigs.

So you were pretty much still doing, you know, content for websites like you were doing because you were just transfer those over, obviously. When did it start becoming a business and not just a necessity for life? This it went more from y'all, okay. I finished school. Do I keep doing this, or do I become the nine to five? Or, like, when did you decide, hey. No. This is a chance for me to be more than just a freelance writer.

Yeah. So I freelanced through a bachelor's degree in psychology, a master's in professional clinical counseling and marriage and family therapy, and another master's in criminology. And all the while throughout those degree programs, I was doing internships. I worked at a drug rehab center, a local community counseling center, and, eventually, I got a job at a mental hospital. And there, I was on track. I was a triage specialist. I was on track to get my licensure, go into the prison system. I had a job that I was keeping an eye on in a local jail here in Texas.

And all the while, I was freelance writing on the side. That was how I paid for school, books, rent, all the things. When I got to that mental hospital job, I thought, oh my god. I don't I don't have to freelance anymore. I don't have to hustle. I'm I'm a grown up. I'm an adult. Like, I have a real job, and I lasted four months.

I hated it. I was terrible at having a boss. I was terrible at working within a system. I was terrible at following rules. And the breaking point for me was I was sitting with this man, and as a triage specialist, what my job was was to do the intake for individuals and then put them into designated pathways that were preapproved, predetermined based on their level of need. So I was sitting with this man who was coming down off of meth, and I had been with him for the I think this was the third time that we had done an intake for him. And he couldn't answer any of my questions because he's, you know, looking at the crazy creatures on the walls and freaking out. And so I'm just sitting there observing him, waiting with him, making sure he doesn't hurt himself, make sure he's okay.

And my supervisor told me, well, you know what to do. Put him through the same protocol. And that broke my brain. I could not understand. This man is back for the third time. It hasn't worked. Why are we going to keep doing the same thing? Doesn't he need a greater level of care? Maybe he needs a different therapist. Maybe he needs a different program.

Maybe he needs a different treatment modality. Why don't we do something different that could possibly actually work for him this time? And I lost it. I I just lost my faith in the system. I lost my faith in the mental health world, and I realized that even though I went into this industry with the intention of helping people who were in their darkest times really change, become new versions of themselves, and become the people they wanted to be, especially because crime is often driven by survival necessities and instincts. And a lot of people in the criminal justice system don't know any better, so I had this intention of helping them figure out better ways. And yet, all of that well intentioned effort was being hamstrung by bureaucracy and red tape and systems that had lost touch with the human side of what people really needed in the mental health world. So that's when I realized I I cannot do this. I cannot be a w two employee.

My boss is a moron. I cannot go through life feeling like I know more or no better than the person who's above me. That was just gonna drive me nuts. And that probably sounds super egotistical, but that was the reality of the drive.

I I I can tell you regardless of people some people listening would say that's egotistical. That is nearly every single feeling, entrepreneurial has had because they're like, we can do this differently. You're not thinking outside the box. You're just staying within the box. Right. And having been a freelancer, being an entrepreneur, you know, like, you've lived so for so long without having a boss, and then all of a sudden you realize, wait. No. Having a boss is not fun.

Not all that it's cracked up to be. So you're having this loss of faith, not only in being an employee, but also into the mental health system, which does not bode well for us, other people who are not in the mental health situations, you know, but anybody can fall down. What did you do after that? Like, how did you go from criminology, you know, looking to help the vulnerable people who really desperately need it that the system has failed to, you know, marking b to b businesses, you know, the kind of the enemy some people would look at. You know? How like, how did you that go about?

Sure. Yeah. It seems like quite a departure. And to be honest, I had a lot of bitterness about all these years and these tens of thousands of dollars that I spent on getting these degrees and, you know, just the the rise and grind of being a student and, you know, having to pay your way through the world. Like, it was it was a lot. I was hustling twenty four seven. And so I had a lot of bitterness about all the wasted time and energy. And when I quit so after this man came in, I think I quit within within a day for sure, but it may have actually been that same day.

And I just threw myself full time into my freelance writing business. And I think I attacked it with such passion and such fervor that it just it grew so fast into the point where I had so much work that I I couldn't do it all myself. So I started by bringing on one additional writer. And then I'm like, okay. Well, I can't write my stuff and edit my writer's stuff, so I need to now bring on an editor. And I gradually grew this team to the point where now we're a team of 19, including several writers, copywriter, copy editors, virtual assistants, graphic designers, videographers, photographers, website developers. And I have my husband who is our accounting manager and our operations manager, and I have my assistant who's our marketing integrator. So we have this wonderful team, and it took me several years to transform the way I looked at my prior experience.

It wasn't until I was on a sales call with someone one day, and they asked me a question that I had been dreading for years, which was, so do you have a degree in marketing and communications? And I had to say, no. I don't have a degree in this thing I'm asking you to pay me for. In fact, my degrees are in psychology, and I thought they were basically gonna hang up on me. And instead, they leaned in. They were fascinated. They go, really? That's interesting because marketing and psychology really go hand in hand. And I just had this epiphany moment where I was like, holy shit. That that's true.

That's absolutely true. Like, marketing and psychology, they're just marketing is a formalized version of psychology. And that was my first kind of integration moment of bringing my past and my educational experience into my new profession and career development. And then as I went on, you know, I liked to experiment in different industries. I've worked in b to c, the subscription industry, b to b tech, education, edutech, home services, trades, all kinds of things. And I really started to find the areas that I enjoyed the most, and that's mostly b to b and specifically working with what I call tech enabled companies. So, you know, a b to b company could be like an electrician who works in commercial businesses only. That's not really my thing.

My thing is companies that have a very tech forward product or service, and they wanna educate people on how to use it. They are trying to be thought leaders and pioneers and innovators in their industry, and they have a real solution to offer people. And as I got more and more into the b two b world, I realized there's some stuff that I love, and there's some stuff that I hate. And the things that fell under that categorical hate column were the manipulation, the ads, the pressure, the FOMO, like, all this social ickiness that happens online through social media and advertising and things like that. And so when I looked at what I loved doing for b two b businesses, it was all very genuine, very positive. It it really leaned towards, you know, CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy in psychology and in narrative therapy and really forming relationships and creating genuine connections with company a offering a solution to a very real and problematic issue that company b is suffering from. And when you can create that connection, you create this win win relationship where nobody feels like, oh, I got got. Nobody feels duped or manipulated or nobody has buyer's remorse.

It's very symbiotic. So that's where I'm driving now, and that's really the force of change I'm trying to have on the marketing industry as a whole.

I love it. I'm fully behind it because I have that same problem because I've I studied marketing. I'm a sociology in university, sociology anthropology, so I understand people, a little bit. So I understand how to manipulate. So I also feel that with the FOMO, it's just like I feel like I'm gonna have buyer's remorse if I'm the client. I don't want my client to have buyer's remorse. I want them to feel like they won in this situation. It's a win win, but I want them to feel like they got one over on me.

And if they feel they got one on over me, that's fine. I still win. Right. No one's losing. That's the thing. And I love I love how you you're doing the same thing. You're trying to change that on this grand scale. Love it.

I wanna talk. Why do you find that ads specifically are part of this manipulative tactic? Because we we obviously people only know about ads Mhmm. To reach out. And it's like, you you have written content, some people like written content, but we're so inundated with ads because it's part of our pretty much you see a billion ads a day nearly now with, Internet. Why do you feel that it's it's a manipulative tactic and not one that can be positive?

So it absolutely can be positive. Ads themselves are not the problem. The problem is that an ad gives you half a second to seven seconds to capture someone's attention. And the challenge is when you're trying to form genuine relationships and really educate buyers, help them become better buyers, and really present the solution that you have to offer in a way that is very, I don't wanna say altruistic, but you're you're giving away information that helps that customer make a smart and informed decision that takes time. So ads shrink your window of time down to this, you know, half second to seven second window. And oftentimes, companies are tempted to use manipulation, to promise these grandiose things that then once you click the ad and you go, oh, yeah. Like, this could be the solution to the problem I'm dealing with, and you step closer and closer and closer, you find out, oh, wait. This isn't what they promised in the ad.

I think that's the real issue is that ads, because of their very nature and their their succinct quality of communication, it's very tempting to do the thing that is going to work quickly and give you that short term result, which is the click and the step closer to me, please. But we need to resist that temptation. There is a way to use ads in a way that is beneficial. And quite honestly, my team is experimenting with ads right now for ourselves because we wanna see, is this possible? Can we take ads and turn them into something positive as opposed to this, oh, ad got me kind of feeling that so many people feel averse to. I mean, a lot of people even go to the Google SERP. They type in something, SERP pops up, and they will deliberately not click anything that says sponsored purely out of spite. They're like, I don't wanna be advertised to, so I'm gonna scroll and scroll and scroll. And, oh, finally, option number seven doesn't say sponsored.

I'm gonna take that one seriously. And so we're experimenting to see, can we reverse that connotation that ads have within people's subliminal interpretations?

I love that. So interesting. It's like you're you're deconstructing a crime because it is kind of a crime on the psyche. Yes. So you're bringing you're bringing in what you're you're you learned in criminology. You're taking in psychology. It's amazing how you're looking at this, and you're taking a very scientific approach to it, which I don't think a lot of marketers take because they're all following the marketing path. They have the marketing degree, which just follows this one path.

And I love talking with people who have degrees in the outside because you're able to bring your expertise and your understanding, to this new problem, and change it for either the better or the worse depending on how we look at it. But Yeah. You seem to be doing at least the better so that people can actually feel empowered by ads. When businesses are looking to become thought leaders, specifically b two b businesses, they can they try a lot of different things. The CEO just tries to go straight for it, or they they mess up most of the time. And what are some of the the simple things b two b businesses can start doing today that's gonna help them even if they, you know, they just started it starts building their thought process, and then they can come to you when they see it starts working.

Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of b two b organizations look at what they're doing from a marketing tactics perspective, and they line it up to the marketing funnel, which most people would say that the marketing funnel is brand awareness, interest, decision, and action. I like to add a fifth option at the bottom there, which is retention. I don't think that you can put retention on the service delivery team or the sales team. I think that also needs to be a marketing responsibility at least in part. So when we're looking at the sales funnel, a lot of companies will look at, oh, okay. We're doing all the things that line up with the funnel.

Meaning, okay. We've got blog content out there and social media content out there. That's very top of funnel, very brand awareness and interest. And then we've got opt ins. That's interest level. We have email nurture sequences. That's the interest and decision level. And then we have these sales calls and, you know, the sales assets, the presentation.

That's all action. The problem is you can be doing all of those right things and still be getting it wrong. And what I mean by that is I recently worked with a company where they were doing all of those things. They were doing all the right things, but they were doing them in the wrong way. If you look at their website content, their blog content, their social media content, all of those things that should be very top of funnel, it was all sales language. It was all hard pressure sales, meaning everything they were doing in their marketing funnel was actually only bottom of funnel. They weren't getting anybody into the funnel, and they were wondering why they were only getting two leads per month. It was because everything was a hard sell.

Contact us today. We're the best at this. We sell this. Choose us for this. It was so over the top, bonk you over the head, try to drag you into the cave and sell you something. It was so aggressive, they weren't getting anybody in. So what we did was we completely pulled all of that sales language even to the extreme of taking the contact us today, little subtext language in the bottom of their social media graphics off. All we wanted to do in order to fix their reputation was offer value.

We just wanna offer you education. We created white papers. We created ebooks, tons and tons of blog content, just answering basic questions that companies have when they're shopping for. In this case, it was a company that offers help desk services and manage services. So if somebody is going to Google typing in how to increase efficiency in our help desk, we wanted to be the ones that popped up right there and create free value add content for people who were searching for that. Not, oh, hey. We do help desk. Buy from us.

That's not the way to get people into your funnel. That's the way to turn people off, make them feel, oof, you're coming on too strong, and then they back away and they always have a bad taste in their mouth about your brand.

I love it. It's great great things to remember that it's give, give, give, and then, you know, hit hit them with the, the the the demand, if you will, the right hook Yeah. As Gary v likes to say. I wanna know because you you you've had a very interesting life. You know, you the situation in university, getting your degrees, freelancing, becoming distraught in the the you know, as an employee after a very I would say another traumatic experience because you're you're seeing this human being failed by the system that's supposed to help him Yeah. To where you are today. It took an investment in who you are, obviously, to get over the first horrific event. What do you do, and how has your investment in yourself changed over the years that you've been this entrepreneur?

Yeah. So one of the things that I do now so in addition to running my content marketing agency, I also have a second business. It's purely a passion project. It's not a money driver for me, but I do business mentoring for freelancers and self employed creatives. And one of the things that I always talk to them about, because it's very tempting nowadays to click these ads that promise a business in a box, and they're saying, hey. If you give us $40,000, we will build everything for you. We'll do everything for you. Create all the funds for you.

You get everything done for you. But then this entrepreneur is sitting there going, okay. Where am I supposed to get $40,000? I can barely pay rent this month. And I always tell my creatives, don't take out loans when you're just starting. I cannot tell you how vast the gap is between pricing and value in terms of what I've invested in myself over the years. When I first started, something like a July book or a April audiobook got me so far. That was the level of investment that I could afford at the time, and it gave me immense value, particularly investments in things like mindset books. You know? Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and, oh, what's the one? Jen Sincero's You Are a Badass at Making Money.

I love that book. Like, affordable, right, for when you're just starting out. As you grow, then start to invest a little bit more. One of the best investments I ever made in myself was joining a mastermind, And I was only a part of that mastermind for about two years, maybe three, now that I think about it. Before I decided, okay, this isn't for me anymore. I feel like I've outgrown this, and I wanna move on to something else. But having that very small, tight knit community of people who were trying to build a lifestyle just as I was and who were going through similar things, investing in, I think it was, like, $4.95 a month or something for this mastermind, That was huge to me at the time, and yet it got me to the point where then I could go on to afford probably the biggest investment that I ever made in myself was about $40,000 for this kind of, like, business strategy, coaching, book, PR bundle thing, which I'm still in the middle of launching, and my book's gonna be coming out sometime next year. I don't know.

Yeah. But it's it's all waiting on me. I'm a hold up here for

Which which most entrepreneurs are for most of their projects.

I know. It's the college kids don't have shoes situation big time. But that's that's been the progression. And oddly enough, even though I'm so glad that I did this $40,000 investment in myself, and I'm so excited to have a book coming out, I think, actually, the most valuable investments I ever made in myself were under $500 and it was all about expanding my mind and expanding my network and my relationships.

I love that. And I love how you you cement it. Like, when you're starting a August, audiobook, can get you so far.

Yes.

And, even free stuff can help you get going. And once you can start doing that little investment, and like you said, over time, you can start putting that 40 k in and get this all inclusive amazing book bundle PR situation that you end up holding up because you're like, oh, yes. I have to write the book, but I have to run a business. I have another business. I have this. I have so much. I'm so busy.

Right. And isn't it funny that when I bought the, you know, August book, I devoured that thing as fast as possible. And now today, I've spent $40,000 on this package, and it's taken me, like, two years to finish all the things on the checklist.

But it's okay because you're it's gonna be released, and it's gonna be one of the best because it's gonna have the true authentic story of you doing, and it's a struggle you're going through. Where do you see yourself in ten years? We know in, like, probably a year you have a book, but in ten years, where where is Ria? What is she doing? Is your passion project now your main hustle? Do you have another passion project while Cornell is now the marketing for b two b businesses?

Yeah. That's a good question. I I've thought about this a lot, especially recently. I've had a a couple hard years. My husband and I lost about half of our family members in the last two years, and it's just kind of given us that that perspective of what really matters. And what really matters to us is our quality time and not being stuck to the computer all the time and really leaving a legacy and having an impact. And so I think coming back to your question, I think in ten years, I want to be teaching. I love to teach.

I love psychology. I love marketing. I love writing. I love communications, and I would love to teach companies or even a class at a university where I can help people see that the way marketing has always been done doesn't have to be the way we keep doing it. You know, a lot of people feel like the marketing and advertising industry are evil, but what if they weren't? What if they were really helpful? What if they provided real solutions, real connections? What if they help you found helped you find the answers to the problems that you're dealing with every day? What if it was a really beneficial industry to humanity? That's what I wanna teach because it's so possible, and my team and I are doing it with individual businesses. But if we only work with, you know, 12 to 20 businesses per year, it's gonna take us forever to have a real impact on the world. So that's really where I wanna be focusing in 10 is building within bigger organizations, which I already do, but I wanna do it on a bigger scale and teaching the next generation of marketers and communicators to put the humanity back into it.

Oh, I love it. It's an amazing goal. I'm so excited. I want you to be back in ten years to have you crush that goal because I'll be here. Yeah. I do the Cornell style of marketing.

Yes. Exactly. Exactly. That's the dream.

Oh, it's a dream that I'm sure you're gonna make it happen. Now we're getting to the real serious question. This is the most important question of the whole podcast. I have your 10 year old self here. Yeah. What's a piece of advice you would love to hand back to your 10 year old 10 year old self?

So I can't remember how old I was. I on ironically, like, the advice that I wanna give actually comes from probably when I was about 10 years old. I I was probably seven, eight, nine, 10, somewhere around there when I stumbled on this quote. And I'm now 34. I'll be 35 in about two weeks. And it has stuck with me, and it's my favorite quote of all time. And the quote is, a man may fall a thousand times, but he will not be a failure until he says somebody pushed him. And as you're going through life, if you're 10 years old and something goes wrong, if you mess up, whatever it might be, you forgot to let the dog out and he went pee on the carpet, or you forgot to turn in your homework assignment, or you missed that goal in your soccer game and your whole team is crushed.

Don't put the blame anywhere outside of yourself. And it's okay to say, I'm human. I messed up. That's okay. But then also look at, what do I need to do differently next time? How can I grow? How can I learn from this? How can I improve from this? Because by taking that perspective of I can always do better, and that's not to say that I'm not good enough. That's to say, in the future, I wanna be even better than I am now. And if you can take that perspective, not a single day of your life will be wasted. You will accelerate far beyond your peers because instead of wasting time putting the blame outside of yourself and having to relearn lessons and relive patterns throughout your life, you can skip over all of that.

And instead, you can just improve every single day little by little.

You're killing me over here. That was amazing. Oh my god. I don't think 10 year olds need to hear. I think everybody in the world needs to hear that. That's amazing. While I digest that, I'm gonna jump off stage or give you the floor. Let my audience know where they can work with you, talk with you, and help heck, you have this coaching.

Maybe they need some coaching. Floor is yours.

Sure. Yeah. You can find me online. LinkedIn is probably the best way to get in touch with me. Ray Cornell, that's r a I, Cornell, c o r n e l l, on LinkedIn. You can also go to our website at Cornellcontentmarketing..com. And if you're interested in starting to infuse your marketing with psychology and demand generation in a way that feels feel good instead of icky, I do have a free resource. I try to teach people all of the things that I do for my clients.

I try to teach that for free so you can start doing it right away, and you can get that at Cornellcontentmarketing.com/demandgenkit.

Amazing. I'm gonna be jumping over to the demand gen kit as soon as this episode's done, recording. Ria, I wanna thank you so much for being here. It was amazing hearing your story of perseverance to where you are today and where you're gonna be going in the next few years. So thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Thank you so much for this platform, for the opportunity, and I just you're such a great interviewer. This is so easy and fun.

Thank you very much for that compliment. I love that. Alright. To my audience, make sure you check out the show notes down below so you can connect with Ria and get her free, resource that she's giving to you guys here today. As always, make sure you subscribe over on Spotify. And the most important thing, remember to invest in yourself.

Thanks for joining us on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The podcast mogul reminds you that your journey to freedom and success starts with one powerful move, investing in yourself. If today's episode sparked your fire, hit that follow button on Spotify and drop us a comment. Share your wins, your challenges, and what drives you to break free from the corporate grind. Remember, you're your best investment. Always invest in yourself because your potential is limitless. Until next time, keep hustling and take control of your destiny.