Look we have another female entrepreneur on my blog who will be sharing digital marketing journey and she is Alexandra Tachalova from Russia who is running her digital business and making impact on people life by motivating people to take actions in their life. I met her online and we become good friends. Making friends across the globe is always blissful and learning from people like Alexandra is so pleasant. So lets start with the interview.
Readers are pretty glad to have you. Please tell us about yourself and your journey into content marketing & PR?
When I look back thinking about the way things have happened in my career, I smile. After I graduated from university with a degree in traditional PR, I thought I made a mistake and would be stuck doing something bland. But I was wrong. A lot has happened to me since then.
I realized that you never know how things will turn out in your life. Now I really love what I do and enjoy every moment I spend working. Analytics is another thing that interests me a lot, and I really enjoy studying how marketing channels work.
That really helps me to come up with an integrated approach to every PR and content marketing activity. For instance, here's my recent post where I talk about the importance of SEO when it comes to delivering a solid content marketing strategy.
How are you bringing traffic to Digital Olympus, what is your main source of traffic?
Digital Olympus is a free online event. The main purpose of this conference is to give people from all over the world an opportunity to learn from talented experts who typically only speak at hard-to-get-in events. Unlike other online events, we don't limit access to our recorded videos after the conference is over.
You can find all of our videos on our YouTube channel. Besides that, I prefer to rent a professional studio for all our recordings which also sets us apart from other online events.
The main traffic channel for us is Social Media because we engage well with the audience we reach out to. Thanks to our speakers and attendees, the word about our conference get out in a heartbeat, people share this event on social media with their own communities.
By the way, Digital Olympus is coming up November 28th, so save your spot and get a chance to listen to international experts who will be sharing their professional experience, learn from their mistakes and success stories, and take advantage of their sure-shot advice.
How much is Digital Olympus worth, and are you planning to sell it?
I don't think this project is worth anything. I mean, the concept of this event is built on my personal connections, all speakers are the people that I know personally. However, this event does help me establish my personal brand, so I decided that my PR strategy is going to be based on bringing maximum value to other people. Hope it stays that way.
Tell us about some of the SEO myths you know, and whether any of them can be debunked?
Oftentimes I hear business owners say that they are going to appear in search results among top positions for a particular list of keywords. But it doesn't work that way. For the majority of industries, the most profitable keywords are the most competitive ones, so a new website is very unlikely to rank well for some specific search queries. In reality, a good SEO expert will need to find such keywords that will guarantee good rankings and will attract relevant users.
What do you do to reach big brands and get yourself featured as an author? What is your strategy?
A person can only do so much. I've started with pitching smaller sites and only after I got some positive feedback, I decided to target bigger sites. For instance, my articles aren't published on Forbes or Inc, however, I have a regular column I write for SEJ and Moz. But I'd like to expand this list, s I'm currently working on it.
Speaking of the strategy, here is my step-by-step process:
- Find the right people to contact. If it's not clear who to reach out to, try researching information about people in this company online, and contact whoever you find through the website. Normally, after about 3-5 messages on LinkedIn, you'll receive an answer.
- The next step is to connect with this person on LinkedIn. Also, it's always a good idea to retweet and like this person's posts on Twitter or Facebook.
- And finally, it's time to send an email with your pitch. In the majority of cases, Hunter.io will help you find an email address of the person you're trying to contact.
How many events you attend per month, are you building your network through events?
I've come to realize that I don't want to be involved in too many events. So right now I do a few events per year. But I still try to connect with as many new people as I possibly can.
How you are building your network? Do you think just exchanging business cards at events will help to get business? How to play smart at events to get business?
When I arrive at an event with a sole purpose of finding partners or clients, I do some homework beforehand. I carefully analyze what brands are sponsoring the event, I connect with the right people in advance as well as try to arrange meetings with them. I've found that this is the best way to establish meaningful relationships and even close your deals.
How to increase your Facebook shared post reach to your audience. Any ideas?
I've noticed that Facebook doesn't work well for B2B brands. If you look at the level of engagement of any digital marketing company, you'll see that it's close to zero. Let's take SocialBakers Facebook community, for example. It has over 330k likes.
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But if we look at the number of likes an individual post has, it will average anywhere from 10 to 20. Posts with a higher number of likes were definitely promoted. My advice here is to use Facebook ads. Don't spend too much, though, just a couple of bucks to promote your post across the pages of your fans and their friends.
How Can I Pitch My Product to Large Companies? For example, my product SchemaNinja?
In this case, I'd stick to the following plan:
- Use tools like Ahrefs and Majestic to find which sites were mentioning similar products.
- Find contacts of copywriters on those sites.
- Send them an email with your product description asking for their feedback about it.
- Structure your further conversation with them based on what they responded with.
How are you planning to increase your brand Digital Olympus reach in social worlds?
Like I said before, I want to use Facebook Ads on a regular basis. Videos also tend to be effective and perform better than other forms of content. Additionally, I want to try to be more active on Facebook groups, especially private ones. I've noticed that users are much more motivated to chat in groups like that.
I see you do a lot of interviews with experts? How do you reach them?
Experts I interview are the people I know personally. So I simply email them, that's it.
How you handle a lot of things like PR and content marketing at same times? Do you have a team?
Nope, I don't have a team.
Lastly, how do you motivate yourself to work hard and stay focused?
At some point of my life, I got fed up with having to work 12-15 hour shifts. I try to keep a balance because I have a hobby that I'm really into. I'm not sure that I'm the best person to advise in this case, but I try to spend some quality time with my friends and family. But it doesn't mean that I don't have to work weekends once in a blue moon 🙂
