Newsletter
I have started a weekly newsletter that I am doing on Thursday’s at 2:05 PM MST. You can sign up for the Aaron W. DeJong Newsletter for free on Medium at the following link:
https://medium.com/aaron-w-dejong-it-articles/newsletter
You could also become a member on Medium which will let you see my articles and blog posts. The Aaron W. DeJong Newsletter is about my sole proprietorship and was fun to put together. There is only one episode which is Episode 1 and was done yesterday. I am doing extra content in the newsletter that will come out on Thursday’s.
Quarterly Goal Setting Q1 2026
• Pass AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner – Foundational Certification
• Pass HubSpot Content Marketing Certification
• Pass SEO Essentials with Semrush Certification
• Work on skill set for Programming and Cloud Networking (ENCC Study)
• Work on technical training skills
Goals
These five goals are the goals that I have for the first quarter of 2026. I decided that in each quarter I should have four or five goals due to me changing them up over the year too many times. This quarter I am focusing on Content Marketing along with the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification to update my skills for my sole proprietorship.
The content marketing certification is the one that I am wanting to do and is more for blog posts and articles. Another one is the Inbound Marketing Certification, also from HubSpot, that I am thinking is more for website content. The Inbound Marketing certification is something that I am interested in as well. I have ten domains that I manage so that would be a beneficial one to get.
Reading
Currently, I am on the sixth book which is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 exam guide. Reading one book or so a week now so I should make some good headway into the books that I still have to read in my stack of books. I am cycling through four books now and will study more for the AWS certification before I take it in the next month or two.
Conclusion
I am studying pretty good for the three certifications that I am doing for my quarterly goals. The courses for HubSpot and Semrush are free so I will be doing them some more next week. Thinking about doing the ENARSI exam from Cisco instead of the ENCC. I will still study for the ENCC though and push it out so that I can study more.
The book list will come out when I am done with ten books, I am doing this quarterly kind of and will set it coming out in ten book intervals with the 40 to 45 books as my reading goal this year. This is the second read-through the CLF-C01 book and will end reading that book for a while unless it is necessary.
