June 16, 2025 • 18 mins
This episode Mira Mikati takes over hosting duties to interview Jeff Byer about the new book he published about Cybersecurity Marketing. They discuss the content of the book, the process of creating a book, and what he would have done differently. Stay tuned to the end for a surprise announcement that Mira is excited about. The book is available for download at https://jbyer.com/free-cybersecurity-ebook and for purchase at Amazon.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to Digital Rage. I'm Mira, the senior project manager here at
(00:06):
Byer Company and I'll be taking over for Jeff today because he did a thing.
He wrote a book. Hi Jeff. Jeff's usually the producer of oh that bit but
sorry I cut you off. No problem. Yes I am the producer. I usually do the
intro to the show but this is Mira's show today so excited to be here Mira
(00:27):
thank you for having me. Of course I mean it is your show technically. So you
wrote a substantial cyber security book identifying and overcoming marketing
pain points in cyber security. Definitely a mouthful but definitely great for
SEO. So let's talk about what the process was like, how distributing a book
(00:49):
and e-book process was and get into the nuts and bolts. Yeah the nitty-gritty.
The nitty-gritty. So what triggered you to expand the insights that you've
learned with our cyber security clients into a full book rather than just like
write a white paper or a couple blogs. So it started out as those little
(01:13):
pieces. I was doing little, you know, I've, how many blogs I think three of them
specifically talk about cyber security and we learn so much doing cyber security
marketing that every little bit was just you know some insight baseball that we
could, we could help and you know and you know peaked behind the scenes we wanted
(01:34):
to use our expertise and our experience to bring in another cyber security
client. So having, being able to publish things that have our expertise outlined in
it was what the real motivation was but I had so many pieces all built up that it
was looking less like publishing a hundred blog posts and more like put it all
(01:58):
into one useful piece of content. So that's how the book was born. That makes a lot
of sense. So before we get into the how we did it let's talk about what it is,
the pain points, the book solves for marketing execs. You want to touch a little bit
on that? Yeah so every cyber security company kind of has these these eight
(02:21):
pitfalls that that can really get in the way of of their messaging and their
marketing and creating clients. The first and foremost being using overly technical
language when you have a variety of different audiences you got the sea level
marketing and technical and if you're always always advertising with the overly
(02:48):
technical language it's not going to work but also in cyber security it is a crowded
marketplace so you got to sell yourself apart and you know our experience is with
an AI powered product but everything these days is AI powered so you don't
really get much bang for your buck just saying that hey cyber security with AI now
(03:09):
you got to say what the AI does how it's different what what's your your unique
selling point and so those types of things are outlined in this book and it goes
through our experience helping our customers solve those issues so it offers
the problem but it also says what we did to solve it and it gives real world
examples of of marketing practices in the wild not particularly from us we
(03:36):
do have some of our own expertise or our own examples in there but it shows
some bigger you know bigger real world marketing campaigns that have worked.
Yeah that's fantastic cheering the wealth of knowledge we have from experience
and others and also it was great to start moving away from the generic messaging
(04:00):
that we see a lot in the industry and the generic visuals and all that like
no more no more hacker and hoodie images please. Yeah once yeah I have a whole
post on that yeah and and we also got as we got more experience and we were
seeing more results we got into the humorous and we got into the the
(04:23):
hilarity of things so but we got we got to be unique in the fact that we were
able to attract and you know assimilate with an audience that's usually more
corporate and what seems uptight we did get a lot of traction with our humorous
and outlandish posts because they stuck out. Correct definitely it was it's
(04:49):
nice to see refreshing messaging always in a technical space. So let's talk
about process process of putting this together obviously there's the
start with the idea and then some drafting and then editing and formatting and
then and then what. So it wasn't until we were publishing that I realized the
(05:17):
start we started off on the wrong foot or I did. Having written the content in
various different formats and yes it was assisted with AI to to write a lot of
this but it used a lot of different AI I used chat GPT Claude and Gemini for
(05:44):
for you know writing certain certain pieces you know this thing's been edited
and proved and you know so it's not AI generated but it's it's the process was
started with AI and with that said it came it came together in a bunch of
(06:06):
different shapes and sizes and so what I did was originally put it into a word
document and what I learned about word is that it probably does have the
right tools that I was looking for as far as you have formatting and structure
but it was too hard to get to or I didn't understand word enough to or been
(06:30):
patient enough to relearn it so I moved it all into Google Docs and Google
Doc could align it up into what looked like HTML or markdown which I completely
understand so I was able to format it better and in Google Docs and I should have
started there and now you see why I love Google Docs I know you you converted me
(06:52):
so we also we also have the you know when we're publishing there's the digital
and the digital we had every single page fully designed by Katie our wonderful
designer and she did such an awesome job but I think that these high end every
(07:17):
page design jobs should be specifically for shorter form content so we can
have like a pamphlet style ebook with with you know 10 to 20 pages and and be able
to pull that off with with graphics and everything but this turned into being book
(07:38):
size and with that many pages I don't think it's worth it to fully design every
page because once we got into the publishing aspect to do the print the print
version of the book that's available on Amazon we had to reformat it
and it basically is just black and white text that's available on a book so we
(08:02):
didn't create a full color full full size you know hardcover book with every
page being in full color this is you got to be readable and black and white so
that's where it should have started was beautiful cover design and then well
formatted Google Doc that we can export into the PDF and send for for the hard
(08:26):
cover printing yeah totally and then that's why we can offer the ebook on our
site and the full designing beautiful shininess that it has but making it for
publisher friendly was a whole different ball game even getting uploaded was a
was a mission I remember yeah so they don't you know with Amazon specifically
(08:50):
they don't give you too much to go on they just say you know it's going to be
six by nine but it's not actually six by nine and it's going to be you know
here's here's the the size of the cover and the bleeds but they don't give you
very specific things and they definitely didn't provide a template so I had to
yeah I had to keep messing with it trial and error to get the the alignment right and
(09:14):
then putting it into print and getting a proof of the book I realized that the
the URL links they just had the link formatted differently but if they just the
text that linked formatted but they didn't expose the link at all so I had to go
back through and put the actual links to resources in the in the foot the
(09:36):
notes so yeah a lot of back and forth and a lot of learning through the publishing
process yeah but surprisingly when I got my copy that I ordered it looks beautiful
like I am shook if at the quality that Amazon is able to put out especially with a
hard cover for that price yeah and as a one-off like to print it just for my
(09:58):
order wild yeah that's amazing just incredible are we listing it anywhere else is
primarily our website is the digital format I might still try wrestling with
with Applebooks yeah that's a pain yeah and so I think what Applebooks wants is
(10:19):
what we needed for Amazon printed books which they don't they what kept
getting rejected was the big full-page designs so I think for Applebooks it's
just got to be something that's just just text so so with what we did to get the
printed book published on Amazon we're going I'm going to go back into Apple and
(10:44):
see if that is enough to provide the digital the digital version of the book
and then yeah it would be both places but obviously you can get the full lead
designed beautiful PDF on our website jbier.com slash free slash cyber security slash
ebook or dash dash let me repeat that dash dash jpe yeah dash dash a free dash
(11:09):
cyber security dash ebook there you go yeah let's do a little bit of a quick
rapid fire to kind of okay settle some so because you touched on it the whole
the value of cope let's start there so cope is create once publish everywhere
yep how was that and do you think that's important to do yeah so the great
(11:36):
thing is is it keeps going we're we're just published a new blog on on one of
the sections today and we're gonna keep put we're gonna put out content
probably for the next year based on what is in this book so create once
published everywhere by Ross Simmons I pull rank on X he is the king of this and
(11:57):
he has a an AI software that he's built and it's it's basically just a
publisher an online publisher that'll take all of your content and just put it
out there and put it everywhere and although not using a software I'm using the
the theory behind it and we're doing all the the content creation and
(12:20):
publishing ourselves and of course Mira is is heading all that up so yes I've
I very much believe in this and and you know that we preach this to our
clients is like get out there constantly try and you know we were if we were
not doing the services for our clients we would be telling our clients hey
(12:41):
can you can you you know push ten pieces of content a week right we repackage
distribute reformat yeah yeah constantly sending the home the same message yep and
here we are talking about on a podcast another avenue of that so yeah and the
podcast itself is distributed in a bunch of different formats is distributed on
(13:06):
its own website it's put on to YouTube as a video and it's put on to all the
podcast apps so it's another distribute everywhere platform that I love using
yeah just lovely this is not so much a rapid fire anymore which is fine with me
discussion I guess let's talk about the book title oh yes okay the book title
(13:34):
this was I never meant for this title to be a book title and it's so wordy and you
can you can say the same thing 45 different ways and I you I still mess it up
it's the the title is too long and too confusing and it should have been much
(13:55):
more concise so that's how I feel about it did your SEO brain take over of course I
know it was meant to be a blog post blog post ended up into a published book amazing yeah
that's just it was so involved that yeah and I didn't I didn't I mean we were too
(14:20):
far along when I noticed that the title was just you know unruly but I just let
apply and I never questioned it that's on me as well I trust you I don't think I
yeah that's my fault I mean look at the book cover it's all just I know
the mission words that it's just the title yeah all right well you know what the
(14:44):
content is still the same well we'll figure out the marketing for it yeah so
would you would you do it again like the whole book process well I've already
started again yes tell me so I'm working on the outline right now for a book
that is potentially going to be titled full stack marketing and I we have a
(15:12):
blog post on what a full stack marketer is but based on my career experience I've
been through all these phases of full stack marketing and all the the skills
that I developed as a as a designer and a developer and then content and
strategy and SEO and so putting it all together into a a book that will explain
(15:38):
each one of the steps and how they're involved and how you take the whole umbrella
of all of these different marketing skills and put it into real-world examples so
that's what the new book is going to be like but I'm going to take my time with it
it's not gonna rush it out very exciting I had no idea that was that was a
(16:01):
secret project see I'm a good interviewer I got it out of you yes so now that
hopefully our clients hear this and do you recommend the like a book process to
them potentially where do you think it fits or doesn't fit in a typical
marketing funnel yeah it's not that we can suggest people do it just to do it
(16:24):
there's got to be a reason and there's got to be an audience our reason for the
cybersecurity book was to attract more cybersecurity clients the reason for my
full-stack marketing book is going to be more educational and and more of an
(16:45):
example of of our experience which could lead to a broader audience and of
course we love as many clients broadly as we can get but for the most part it's
going to be specifically for marketers so that that even people starting in
marketing and want to know how the whole platter of skills comes together it's a
(17:12):
lot of it it's based on experience and it can't be taught and you can't go to
school for it so this is from my experience and how I put it all to work for us
and our clients is is how that the next book is gonna is gonna go but for
telling our clients to build something or to put a book out we just have to
(17:36):
define the goals and define the audience and make sure that it's it's something
that's going to to benefit them either in their own marketing or in the
bottom line so yeah it's something that now that I've gone through the
experience and I know the steps to take I know what the investment is and so I
can help a client walk through their return on investment and see if it makes
(18:01):
sense to do it I think that covers everything well thank you for this it's been
lovely chatting with you great to chat with you even though I chat with you
multiple times a day every day and all day on Slack correct again lovely
read of not readers listeners lovely listeners you can find the book at jbuyer.com
slash free dash cyber security dash ebook or on Amazon if you want a hard copy to
(18:26):
share with your C-suite yes and thank you very much for listening and keep us in
mind for any of your digital marketing we'll catch you on the next one bye reach out
to us at jbuyer.com for comments and questions follow us at buyer company on
social media and if you'd be so kind please rate and review us in your podcast
(18:50):
up.
Welcome back to Digital Rage. I'm Mira, the senior project manager here at
(00:06):
Byer Company and I'll be taking over for Jeff today because he did a thing.
He wrote a book. Hi Jeff. Jeff's usually the producer of oh that bit but
sorry I cut you off. No problem. Yes I am the producer. I usually do the
intro to the show but this is Mira's show today so excited to be here Mira
(00:27):
thank you for having me. Of course I mean it is your show technically. So you
wrote a substantial cyber security book identifying and overcoming marketing
pain points in cyber security. Definitely a mouthful but definitely great for
SEO. So let's talk about what the process was like, how distributing a book
(00:49):
and e-book process was and get into the nuts and bolts. Yeah the nitty-gritty.
The nitty-gritty. So what triggered you to expand the insights that you've
learned with our cyber security clients into a full book rather than just like
write a white paper or a couple blogs. So it started out as those little
(01:13):
pieces. I was doing little, you know, I've, how many blogs I think three of them
specifically talk about cyber security and we learn so much doing cyber security
marketing that every little bit was just you know some insight baseball that we
could, we could help and you know and you know peaked behind the scenes we wanted
(01:34):
to use our expertise and our experience to bring in another cyber security
client. So having, being able to publish things that have our expertise outlined in
it was what the real motivation was but I had so many pieces all built up that it
was looking less like publishing a hundred blog posts and more like put it all
(01:58):
into one useful piece of content. So that's how the book was born. That makes a lot
of sense. So before we get into the how we did it let's talk about what it is,
the pain points, the book solves for marketing execs. You want to touch a little bit
on that? Yeah so every cyber security company kind of has these these eight
(02:21):
pitfalls that that can really get in the way of of their messaging and their
marketing and creating clients. The first and foremost being using overly technical
language when you have a variety of different audiences you got the sea level
marketing and technical and if you're always always advertising with the overly
(02:48):
technical language it's not going to work but also in cyber security it is a crowded
marketplace so you got to sell yourself apart and you know our experience is with
an AI powered product but everything these days is AI powered so you don't
really get much bang for your buck just saying that hey cyber security with AI now
(03:09):
you got to say what the AI does how it's different what what's your your unique
selling point and so those types of things are outlined in this book and it goes
through our experience helping our customers solve those issues so it offers
the problem but it also says what we did to solve it and it gives real world
examples of of marketing practices in the wild not particularly from us we
(03:36):
do have some of our own expertise or our own examples in there but it shows
some bigger you know bigger real world marketing campaigns that have worked.
Yeah that's fantastic cheering the wealth of knowledge we have from experience
and others and also it was great to start moving away from the generic messaging
(04:00):
that we see a lot in the industry and the generic visuals and all that like
no more no more hacker and hoodie images please. Yeah once yeah I have a whole
post on that yeah and and we also got as we got more experience and we were
seeing more results we got into the humorous and we got into the the
(04:23):
hilarity of things so but we got we got to be unique in the fact that we were
able to attract and you know assimilate with an audience that's usually more
corporate and what seems uptight we did get a lot of traction with our humorous
and outlandish posts because they stuck out. Correct definitely it was it's
(04:49):
nice to see refreshing messaging always in a technical space. So let's talk
about process process of putting this together obviously there's the
start with the idea and then some drafting and then editing and formatting and
then and then what. So it wasn't until we were publishing that I realized the
(05:17):
start we started off on the wrong foot or I did. Having written the content in
various different formats and yes it was assisted with AI to to write a lot of
this but it used a lot of different AI I used chat GPT Claude and Gemini for
(05:44):
for you know writing certain certain pieces you know this thing's been edited
and proved and you know so it's not AI generated but it's it's the process was
started with AI and with that said it came it came together in a bunch of
(06:06):
different shapes and sizes and so what I did was originally put it into a word
document and what I learned about word is that it probably does have the
right tools that I was looking for as far as you have formatting and structure
but it was too hard to get to or I didn't understand word enough to or been
(06:30):
patient enough to relearn it so I moved it all into Google Docs and Google
Doc could align it up into what looked like HTML or markdown which I completely
understand so I was able to format it better and in Google Docs and I should have
started there and now you see why I love Google Docs I know you you converted me
(06:52):
so we also we also have the you know when we're publishing there's the digital
and the digital we had every single page fully designed by Katie our wonderful
designer and she did such an awesome job but I think that these high end every
(07:17):
page design jobs should be specifically for shorter form content so we can
have like a pamphlet style ebook with with you know 10 to 20 pages and and be able
to pull that off with with graphics and everything but this turned into being book
(07:38):
size and with that many pages I don't think it's worth it to fully design every
page because once we got into the publishing aspect to do the print the print
version of the book that's available on Amazon we had to reformat it
and it basically is just black and white text that's available on a book so we
(08:02):
didn't create a full color full full size you know hardcover book with every
page being in full color this is you got to be readable and black and white so
that's where it should have started was beautiful cover design and then well
formatted Google Doc that we can export into the PDF and send for for the hard
(08:26):
cover printing yeah totally and then that's why we can offer the ebook on our
site and the full designing beautiful shininess that it has but making it for
publisher friendly was a whole different ball game even getting uploaded was a
was a mission I remember yeah so they don't you know with Amazon specifically
(08:50):
they don't give you too much to go on they just say you know it's going to be
six by nine but it's not actually six by nine and it's going to be you know
here's here's the the size of the cover and the bleeds but they don't give you
very specific things and they definitely didn't provide a template so I had to
yeah I had to keep messing with it trial and error to get the the alignment right and
(09:14):
then putting it into print and getting a proof of the book I realized that the
the URL links they just had the link formatted differently but if they just the
text that linked formatted but they didn't expose the link at all so I had to go
back through and put the actual links to resources in the in the foot the
(09:36):
notes so yeah a lot of back and forth and a lot of learning through the publishing
process yeah but surprisingly when I got my copy that I ordered it looks beautiful
like I am shook if at the quality that Amazon is able to put out especially with a
hard cover for that price yeah and as a one-off like to print it just for my
(09:58):
order wild yeah that's amazing just incredible are we listing it anywhere else is
primarily our website is the digital format I might still try wrestling with
with Applebooks yeah that's a pain yeah and so I think what Applebooks wants is
(10:19):
what we needed for Amazon printed books which they don't they what kept
getting rejected was the big full-page designs so I think for Applebooks it's
just got to be something that's just just text so so with what we did to get the
printed book published on Amazon we're going I'm going to go back into Apple and
(10:44):
see if that is enough to provide the digital the digital version of the book
and then yeah it would be both places but obviously you can get the full lead
designed beautiful PDF on our website jbier.com slash free slash cyber security slash
ebook or dash dash let me repeat that dash dash jpe yeah dash dash a free dash
(11:09):
cyber security dash ebook there you go yeah let's do a little bit of a quick
rapid fire to kind of okay settle some so because you touched on it the whole
the value of cope let's start there so cope is create once publish everywhere
yep how was that and do you think that's important to do yeah so the great
(11:36):
thing is is it keeps going we're we're just published a new blog on on one of
the sections today and we're gonna keep put we're gonna put out content
probably for the next year based on what is in this book so create once
published everywhere by Ross Simmons I pull rank on X he is the king of this and
(11:57):
he has a an AI software that he's built and it's it's basically just a
publisher an online publisher that'll take all of your content and just put it
out there and put it everywhere and although not using a software I'm using the
the theory behind it and we're doing all the the content creation and
(12:20):
publishing ourselves and of course Mira is is heading all that up so yes I've
I very much believe in this and and you know that we preach this to our
clients is like get out there constantly try and you know we were if we were
not doing the services for our clients we would be telling our clients hey
(12:41):
can you can you you know push ten pieces of content a week right we repackage
distribute reformat yeah yeah constantly sending the home the same message yep and
here we are talking about on a podcast another avenue of that so yeah and the
podcast itself is distributed in a bunch of different formats is distributed on
(13:06):
its own website it's put on to YouTube as a video and it's put on to all the
podcast apps so it's another distribute everywhere platform that I love using
yeah just lovely this is not so much a rapid fire anymore which is fine with me
discussion I guess let's talk about the book title oh yes okay the book title
(13:34):
this was I never meant for this title to be a book title and it's so wordy and you
can you can say the same thing 45 different ways and I you I still mess it up
it's the the title is too long and too confusing and it should have been much
(13:55):
more concise so that's how I feel about it did your SEO brain take over of course I
know it was meant to be a blog post blog post ended up into a published book amazing yeah
that's just it was so involved that yeah and I didn't I didn't I mean we were too
(14:20):
far along when I noticed that the title was just you know unruly but I just let
apply and I never questioned it that's on me as well I trust you I don't think I
yeah that's my fault I mean look at the book cover it's all just I know
the mission words that it's just the title yeah all right well you know what the
(14:44):
content is still the same well we'll figure out the marketing for it yeah so
would you would you do it again like the whole book process well I've already
started again yes tell me so I'm working on the outline right now for a book
that is potentially going to be titled full stack marketing and I we have a
(15:12):
blog post on what a full stack marketer is but based on my career experience I've
been through all these phases of full stack marketing and all the the skills
that I developed as a as a designer and a developer and then content and
strategy and SEO and so putting it all together into a a book that will explain
(15:38):
each one of the steps and how they're involved and how you take the whole umbrella
of all of these different marketing skills and put it into real-world examples so
that's what the new book is going to be like but I'm going to take my time with it
it's not gonna rush it out very exciting I had no idea that was that was a
(16:01):
secret project see I'm a good interviewer I got it out of you yes so now that
hopefully our clients hear this and do you recommend the like a book process to
them potentially where do you think it fits or doesn't fit in a typical
marketing funnel yeah it's not that we can suggest people do it just to do it
(16:24):
there's got to be a reason and there's got to be an audience our reason for the
cybersecurity book was to attract more cybersecurity clients the reason for my
full-stack marketing book is going to be more educational and and more of an
(16:45):
example of of our experience which could lead to a broader audience and of
course we love as many clients broadly as we can get but for the most part it's
going to be specifically for marketers so that that even people starting in
marketing and want to know how the whole platter of skills comes together it's a
(17:12):
lot of it it's based on experience and it can't be taught and you can't go to
school for it so this is from my experience and how I put it all to work for us
and our clients is is how that the next book is gonna is gonna go but for
telling our clients to build something or to put a book out we just have to
(17:36):
define the goals and define the audience and make sure that it's it's something
that's going to to benefit them either in their own marketing or in the
bottom line so yeah it's something that now that I've gone through the
experience and I know the steps to take I know what the investment is and so I
can help a client walk through their return on investment and see if it makes
(18:01):
sense to do it I think that covers everything well thank you for this it's been
lovely chatting with you great to chat with you even though I chat with you
multiple times a day every day and all day on Slack correct again lovely
read of not readers listeners lovely listeners you can find the book at jbuyer.com
slash free dash cyber security dash ebook or on Amazon if you want a hard copy to
(18:26):
share with your C-suite yes and thank you very much for listening and keep us in
mind for any of your digital marketing we'll catch you on the next one bye reach out
to us at jbuyer.com for comments and questions follow us at buyer company on
social media and if you'd be so kind please rate and review us in your podcast
(18:50):
up.
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