Korina Dove singlehandedly crafts senior annual
To help you get a grasp on how long I’ve been “doing” content, let’s go as far back to my 1989 high school yearbook class, where four of the ladies in the photo above stuck me, the second one from the right, with the duties of putting together basically our entire senior annual. Just ask them. They’ll tell you they were down in the foyer eating Cool Ranch Doritos and drinking Mountain Dew while I was writing cutlines, drafting pages, and developing photos in the dark room all by myself. I still depend on all of them to this day for a shoulder to cry on, but I’ve never, not once ever since 1989 asked them for any help with content stuff.
Dove ends lusty romance with journalism to pursue weird media calling
After the late, great yearbook arrival of 1992, I was knee-deep in diapers for a couple years and bored to tears with rural Oklahoma, so I did what any sensible, broke, single-mother would do: I went back to college. (I went for one semester after the yearbook was finalized, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I got married and had a baby instead. That seemed like a fine plan in my 19-year-old mind at the time.)
‘Twas there I feel head over heels in love with Ja … I mean, journalism. Journalism actually was my first love, and I wooed it and courted it and finally married it, exploring all of its intricacies during our 17-year relationship. Through newspaper reporting, I discovered that I could travel and write about all kinds of people and places and things. So, I went all the way to … Kansas and back to Oklahoma again. Still, I was an award-winning champion for open records, freedom of information, and the Fourth Estate until … God threw me an Ezekiel moment and called me into missions.
Now, when I say, “God called me into missions,” I don’t mean He asked me to go on a missions trip to Guatemala or something for a week with a church group, not that there’s anything wrong with that. No, I mean, He called me to take two of my children, sell everything we owned, and move to Chiang Mai, Thailand – a city I’d never heard of and a country I had to look up on a map. So, I did.
And for five years, I lent my media and communications skills to Youth With A Mission by helping to promote volunteer projects in exchange for God’s faithful, never-wavering, never-failing financial, emotional, and spiritual support. He came through in full and then some.
Goals of earning master’s degree, snagging foreign husband, working for corporate ALL realized
During the next seven years in Bangkok, I was blessed to complete YWAM’s School of Biblical studies, a research-intensive writing course which inspired me to begin my life’s project, Bible Studies for writers, along with a master’s degree in communications, and a TOEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification. I also snagged a pretty handsome, British-speaking, university-level English professor for a husband. (That first husband didn’t work out, but that baby turned out awesome!)
With my TOEFL cerftificate, I set out to make it as an English teacher for the Royal Thai Navy, which taught me two things: I did not want to be a teacher, and the English language has a million nuances.I didn’t even know that my latter revelation was just a tiny concept of what I would learn about global content and localization of U.S. English until I joined the content team of the fastest growing online travel agency in Southeast Asia.
The terms A/B testing and PPC and SEO came flying at me from all directions, so I had to learn fast how to scale and test and which acronyms stand for what. And 99.9 percent of the time I was doing all those things, I was thinking, “They’re really letting me do this for them???” But they just kept letting me do the content things, so I just kept doing them … for six and a half years, the longest I’ve ever spent at any job, anywhere. In other words, I loved it, and they let me stay, so I must have been good at it, right? 🤷🏻♀️
Small business owner points finger and says, ‘You’re good at this content stuff, Korina!’
Dove returns to roots to provide DIY content solutions for small business owners and rural community leaders
Anyway, as much as I did love it, I also kinda love my family, and after more than a decade in Thailand, I kinda missed them. Plus, I have grandkids now, so that’s like a major game-changer. So, in March 2023, I made the move back to America, where I dibbled and dawdled and pooed around trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grow up again, and it hit me square in the face one day when a friend from my small home town called to ask me a question about content. She’d been struggling for weeks, and we got her sorted out in less than 20 minutes.
Before she hung up she said, “You know, what you provide to small business owners is really valuable. Not everyone understands this content stuff. This is fun for you, isn’t it?”
Or something like that. Those might not have been her exact words, but I took every one of them to heart.
And here we are.
In summary, and to please the Google bots, I help small-town folks sort out their content stuff. That’s what I do.
Oh, and I play bingo sometimes, too.
More details about Korina Dove’s writing career and high school achievements than you ever wanted to know
Dove: I warned you that I’m an oversharer
If you want all my nerdy credential and whatnot, swing by my LinkedIn page. My whole dang life is on there. I even listed my cheesy awards and my Girls’ State delegation. I did not mention that I was the 1989-90 Cherokee High school Footbsll Homeciming Queen, so I am here. I’d also like to announce that I was voted the Most likely to succeed of our senior class, and I am still working on trying to hone that designation oh which I so humbly revived with so much honor all those years ago, in the last century even.
A final photo, just to say, ‘I told you so’
My oldest daughter said I can’t use this photo on my website because it’s too old, but I told her I’d find a use for it. Here’s a story about this photo.