how to get a job in marketing without a resume 3 d with timestamps YoutubeScribe.com

[0:00] What's up guys? It's
Sam Oh here, and today
[0:02] we're joined by about half
of the Ahrefs Marketing crew.
[0:07] First time that Josh and I
have met, as well as Tim.
[0:09] So we've never met each other.
[0:11] But we're here in Singapore,
and we're just talking about kind of
[0:15] how we joined Ahrefs and just kind
of our journey along the way,
[0:19] and I guess how we all got to meet today
[0:21] and for that reason.
[0:22] So today we're just here
to discuss kind of our own stories,
[0:25] share our marketing
journeys and hopefully to
[0:28] help you guys out with, I
guess, finding your dream job or
[0:32] no, that's not right, I guess.
[0:34] [laughing]
[0:35] So yeah... So, basically...
[0:36] You mean it's not your dream job?
[0:37] [laughing]
[0:38] It's not my dream job.
[0:41] Basically just helping you guys
to progress in your careers
[0:44] and, yeah, just if you guys can take
anything actionable away from
[0:49] our stories and the things that we share today, awesome.
[0:51] If not, enjoy the show!
[0:53] [upbeat music]
[0:57] Yeah, so why don't we get started with Tim?
[1:00] How did you start with Ahrefs?
[1:02] Okay so, this is the question
I get asked quite often,
[1:07] basically, when I meet any new people,
[1:09] eventually everything will
come to that question
[1:12] like how did you end up with
Ahrefs, like what's your story?
[1:15] Especially since I am from Ukraine,
[1:18] and now I'm working for a
company that like does global stuff,
[1:22] so how did it all go?
[1:25] I actually, I've been to
SEO and digital marketing
[1:30] for I think nine years right now,
[1:32] and it all started from some junior SEO role.
[1:37] When I was trying to learn SEO myself,
[1:40] reading different blogs, watching videos,
[1:42] and trying out like my small new websites,
[1:45] for like Amazon Affiliates,
for just banner advertising
[1:51] back when you could make
money with banner advertising
[1:54] and all that stuff, and
fast forward a few years,
[1:58] when I had enough experience,
and enough like money in my account
[2:04] to create something on my own,
[2:07] I started my personal blog,
[2:08] and I started some projects
on my own, and I even launched
[2:13] a tool that was supposed to
be kind of BuzzSumo competitor,
[2:17] but at that time I didn't
know even that BuzzSumo exists,
[2:20] because it was like I think
four or five years ago,
[2:23] so I've never heard of BuzzSumo,
but I wanted to create a tool
[2:28] where you would plug someone's
blog, and it would show you
[2:32] the most popular articles on that blog.
[2:34] Because like back then no one was
doing it but everyone wanted
[2:37] to know like what gets popular on social media,
[2:40] what gets more tweets, likes,
[2:41] it was shortly after Facebook
and Twitter introduced their
[2:46] Tweet and Like buttons that
all the websites implemented.
[2:48] So it was like a thing.
[2:51] And as I was releasing
these kinds of projects
[2:54] and working on my personal
blog, I was doing outreach.
[2:58] So classic outreach to get links,
[3:01] classic outreach to get guest articles,
[3:04] to get mentions, and all that stuff.
[3:06] And in the process of
outreach I reached out to
[3:11] Ahrefs blog. Back then
it was handled by Helen,
[3:16] she works in support. She was
doing these roundups of links,
[3:20] like, "Here's what like weekly stuff
that was happening in the SEO
[3:25] and the marketing space."
[3:26] And she was listing some
interesting articles.
[3:29] So I reached out to her
and I knew that Ahrefs
[3:32] is company that comes from Ukraine,
[3:35] that the founder is Ukrainian,
[3:36] because I've read a few
of his interviews online.
[3:39] So I basically wrote kind
of cheesy email saying that like
[3:43] I'm a fellow Ukrainian and
we should help each other,
[3:46] like some bonding and all that stuff.
[3:48] I don't remember what exactly I wanted,
[3:51] if I showed them my article
or if I showed them my tool,
[3:55] or whatever it was,
[3:57] but I think I got featured
in this kind of roundup
[4:00] and shortly after this I got an email from
[4:03] Ahrefs founder and CEO Dmitry,
[4:06] who said that he
researched me a little bit,
[4:08] he likes my work and he invited me
[4:11] to kind of write a few articles for Ahrefs
[4:14] and see if we can work together.
[4:15] So, this is how it all started,
like so it's not me who suggested
[4:22] to work for Ahrefs, it's
Dmitry who actually researched
[4:25] my work. He actually saw
that I had published articles
[4:28] on Moz blog and that
article had won some awards,
[4:36] so I think this impressed
him and he kind of wanted
[4:39] to try working with me,
and actually quite fast,
[4:42] I think within two weeks,
maybe three weeks max,
[4:47] as I started digging into Ahrefs tools,
[4:50] I saw a lot of things that I
didn't think were quite right.
[4:54] So I wanted to improve them
[4:55] and I messaged Dmitry all the time,
[4:58] like I don't think like your homepage copy is great.
[5:03] I don't think that what you're publishing
[5:05] on your blog is great.
[5:06] I don't think that you're like
explaining the metrics
[5:09] in the interface well, and all that stuff.
[5:12] Or like suggesting some kind of features,
[5:14] like it would be fun to have
this kind of filter here,
[5:17] it would be fun to have
this kind of report.
[5:19] And so basically within
like two or three weeks,
[5:23] like I started working more
and more with Ahrefs
[5:26] and not only kind of writing some
articles for them but also
[5:29] contributing to the
actual product development
[5:32] and creating the website, website copy,
[5:35] working on pricing
page and all that little stuff.
[5:38] And Dmitry, shortly after,
offered me to come to Singapore
[5:42] and to be in charge of marketing.
[5:45] "Be in charge of marketing",
I would say, quote unquote
[5:47] because I was the only marketing person
[5:49] when I came to Singapore.
[5:51] Shortly before I came to
Singapore, the woman that was
[5:56] working in Ahrefs marketing,
she left for another company,
[5:59] so basically there was no
one for me to work with
[6:02] and I was the only person.
[6:04] So this is how it all started for me.
[6:06] I started working myself
on pretty much everything,
[6:11] like on homepage copy, on YouTube
channel, on blog, on hints,
[6:15] reports, feature requests, design,
[6:18] like I was doing everything like myself.
[6:22] And then, with time,
[6:25] I got to like hiring people who would help me,
[6:29] who are better than myself at something,
[6:32] and this is how these
two guys ended up here.
[6:36] So I think between you two,
Josh was the next hire.
[6:42] Yes.
Yeah.
[6:43] So, Josh, do you want to
tell the story from your end,
[6:45] because I've seen how
it happened from my end.
[6:47] Yeah, so I think it was like
a couple of years ago now,
[6:54] I was working on like a big
link building strategies
[6:58] that's kind of post, that hopefully
[7:01] some of you might have seen at some point,
[7:04] and, yeah, I spent like five months creating that
[7:08] and then published it on my own blog.
[7:10] Five months.
[7:11] Yeah, like on and off for five months.
[7:14] It was like 60,000 words.
[7:15] Yeah it was huge.
[7:16] Too much really, but then I think
you reached out to me, Tim,
[7:21] in like 2016, like mid-2016, like September or something,
[7:28] yeah 2016, and you said, you know,
[7:30] do I wanna write a post for the Ahrefs blog
[7:33] and I kind of did and it just all kind of
went on from there.
[7:38] So I was like freelancing
until earlier this year,
[7:43] freelancing, just doing writing for the blog
[7:46] and then kind of officially
got hired earlier this year.
[7:50] So now... I'm now head of content
which basically just means that
[7:53] I'm doing more of the same thing.
[7:55] But yeah.
[7:57] Yeah, so.
[7:58] I think the interesting bit
that you're overlooking is
[8:01] that I actually asked you,
[8:03] like what's your motivation to
publish such a huge article?
[8:08] How do you say, how long it was?
[8:09] 60k words?
[8:11] Yeah, 60,000 words.
[8:12] Yeah, so it was a huge article
there was a lot of content,
[8:15] there was like a ton of work
invested there, and it was
[8:18] published at basically a
blog that was just launched.
[8:21] Yeah.
[8:22] There was nothing
there but this article
[8:23] and I wrote an email to Josh and like said,
[8:26] like what's your motivation in
doing this kind of work?
[8:29] Do you think that you can get like
better ROI if you write for us?
[8:34] Do you want like to build kind of your
credibility in the niche?
[8:40] Do you want to kind of end up creating
some kind of paid courses?
[8:45] Or like do you want to scale your agency?
[8:47] Like whatever you do, I see that
you are like willing to invest
[8:53] a lot of work, so I'm sure
that we can figure out
[8:56] between you and Ahrefs a way where like each of us will benefit.
[9:00] Yeah.
[9:00] And so I think this
was persuasive enough
[9:02] for Josh to join.
[9:03] Yeah.
[9:04] Yeah, so basically I just
like to do good work,
[9:09] that's all that really drives
me to do anything really,
[9:11] I just want to make something that's good
[9:13] and then that, you know, people actually
want to read and benefit from
[9:17] and you kind of just give
me the ability to do that,
[9:20] you just give me the freedom to do that
[9:22] and like the resources to do that.
[9:24] So there's nothing that
could be better really,
[9:27] from my point of view,
because that's why I enjoy
[9:30] just creating something and just putting something out there
[9:33] for people to read and learn from.
[9:36] Yeah, and actually I think
one other interesting thing
[9:40] that I want to share
right now is that usually
[9:42] when you read some kind of hiring advice,
[9:46] the most common advice
that they give you is
[9:48] that you should hire
people better than you.
[9:52] But it's like super hard,
[9:53] like if you're quite
knowledgeable in what you do,
[9:57] it's super hard to find people
who are better than you.
[10:00] But in case of Josh, it
was like the actual case
[10:03] when I realized that this guy can produce
[10:05] content like way better than I am.
[10:07] And one other thing is that
Josh has like some experience
[10:13] with stuff that I don't
know anything about,
[10:16] like scrapping, Google Sheets,
working with different tools.
[10:21] So I don't have a lot
of experience with that,
[10:23] I'm more like a generalist,
so I know kind of the basics of
[10:28] here and there and I can connect the dots
[10:31] but if you dig a little bit deeper,
[10:33] my knowledge is not so good.
[10:34] So this is why I was like super happy to find Josh,
[10:37] and I really, before Josh, I
was struggling to find someone
[10:42] for Ahrefs blog, who would
have like more experience than me
[10:47] in SEO and except for
that would be able to
[10:50] kind of write it in an article, in a good article.
[10:54] Because a lot of people have
better experience than me
[10:57] in SEO, like it's not that hard to
be better than myself at SEO,
[11:01] especially technical SEO,
[11:02] but like combine that with
ability to explain yourself
[11:06] and to write like great article, that's rare.
[11:09] So, like I kind of took the proactive approach,
[11:13] I didn't just post a few
ads on different sites,
[11:16] that we're looking for like Head of Content,
[11:19] we're looking for Blog Editor,
[11:21] who would take our blog to
next level, blah blah blah.
[11:24] Actually I did post this kind of things.
[11:25] Yeah, I think I saw a posting like that.
[11:27] Yeah, I did post these kinds of ads,
[11:29] but like it wasn't working, I saw
that everyone who applied
[11:34] wasn't really what I was
looking for, so when I saw Josh
[11:37] published this like huge, monstrous
article I kind of knew
[11:41] that I should like hire this guy
immediately and I was lucky that
[11:45] he only published one article on his blog.
[11:47] He didn't invest like enough
time, and money, and resources
[11:51] into his blog to be willing
to abandon it afterwards.
[11:55] So I think some luck
was also involved there.
[11:58] Yeah, I think that's some
pretty good advice that
[12:01] you mentioned: "Someone
who's better than you."
[12:03] And so Josh didn't come up to you and say,
[12:05] like I'm better than you at
SEO so, you know, you should hire me.
[12:08] Yeah.
[12:09] But he just kind of
proved himself through it.
[12:11] And I think for startups,
for small mid-size companies
[12:13] that's often what they're looking for,
[12:15] is someone who's
self-sufficient and you know,
[12:18] can direct it with minimal
supervision I guess,
[12:21] minimal training, and I
think that's really good,
[12:24] is that you were able to go out
[12:26] and create a 60,000-word post.
[12:28] Yeah.
[12:28] I can't even call it a post,
like that probably took like,
[12:30] your page speed was probably like 25 seconds
[12:33] just to load that text but you know,
[12:35] is to be able to go
out there, be proactive,
[12:37] just to do it, to show that, you know, you're more than
[12:41] knowledgeable enough, what's
the word that I'm looking for...
[12:45] Self-sufficient?
[12:46] I don't know if it's the right
word but I think you guys...
[12:48] No problem, English
is your first language,
[12:49] it's OK for you to
not to know all this.
[12:51] It's okay, I'm trying,
I'm just trying. [laughing]
[12:54] Yeah, but anyway. So for me...
[12:56] For you.
[12:57] Very, very different story, so...
[13:01] Ok, tell them that I don't know it,
because you told us.
[13:04] Tim doesn't know it.
[13:05] Three times, that I don't know how
[13:08] I don't think I know the full story.
[13:09] Yeah, so like I told Tim, I kept
telling Tim, you don't know it,
[13:13] and so I kind of wanted him to say,
[13:14] you wanna give me a heads up before,
[13:15] so this is the first time
that Tim's hearing this.
[13:20] Okay, so basically I
come from a background,
[13:22] originally I started online
marketing end of 2008,
[13:26] and so I started to build my own company,
[13:29] sold it off, the typical
story that you hear from
[13:31] the younger generation
now of internet marketers.
[13:36] And so I experimented quite a bit,
[13:37] And I was trying to figure out,
what is it that I enjoy doing.
[13:40] It is SEO, CRO, lead gen,
because when I started
[13:44] my first business I
knew absolutely nothing,
[13:46] I kind of had to learn
everything on my own.
[13:49] And so I eventually
settled on lead generation,
[13:54] particularly in CRO and so,
[13:57] I started doing my own
little projects and stuff,
[14:01] eventually got a lucky break
with a company that would
[14:05] send me leads and so I would
just do agency type work.
[14:11] And then from there, I 
just started doing lead gen.
[14:13] I started my own personal blog,
[14:16] and then I was like, I
have a really cool idea,
[14:19] and so like I tend to come
up with like ideas, that I think
[14:21] are pretty creative, I don't
know if these guys think so
[14:24] but I think that they're pretty creative,
[14:27] and so I was like, you know what,
[14:29] if I wanted to get a new
client for agency work,
[14:33] what if I look at the intention.
[14:36] So the intention is, if
you look at a job post,
[14:39] you already know that they're
trying to hire someone.
[14:41] So, if I do that and the
intent is already there,
[14:45] then it must be easier to close.
[14:47] Does that make sense?
[14:48] Okay.
[14:49] And so, I was looking
through like some of my blogs,
[14:52] and the blogs that I like, and the websites,
[14:55] and I was already an Ahrefs
customer for a few years
[14:58] and I saw a position for a Funnel Hacker.
[15:00] And so I was like, interesting, funnels,
[15:03] I can do funnels, that's easy,
[15:04] I'm probably, you know, better
than the average person, you know,
[15:08] who does like one drip sequence
[15:09] and that's considered a
funnel, which it's not.
[15:13] But then I was like,
cool, so I emailed Tim
[15:15] and I basically just said hey,
[15:17] I answered all his questions,
hey here's my funnel,
[15:20] sent him a video,
[15:21] I don't know if other
people sent you videos,
[15:23] or if you even had other applications.
[15:24] No, I don't think I had
too many applications,
[15:26] just a few and I don't even
remember if they sent me
[15:29] any videos at all.
[15:30] Yeah, so I sent him a video,
kind of just walking him
[15:33] through it, and we were just
sending emails back and forth
[15:35] and so like, my whole
intention this time was,
[15:38] Ahrefs would be a great
client to have, right?
[15:40] And Tim's, I'm guessing your intent was,
[15:44] we're looking for someone
to hire like an employee.
[15:46] Yeah.
[15:46] And so we had different things
[15:47] and so I was like you
know what, it doesn't matter,
[15:49] it's more or less the same thing.
[15:50] It's just a matter of the
way that you look at it.
[15:53] And so we ended up talking and we talked
[15:56] for about four months.
[15:58] I think maybe more, it
was a lot of back and forth.
[16:00] It was four months and then you said,
[16:02] we don't want that right now
[16:03] and I was like, no problem, that's cool.
[16:06] And so, you're like but we
may open that position up
[16:09] a few months later, so
I was like, sounds good.
[16:12] So Tim didn't follow up, and so of course,
[16:16] being in lead gen, I was like, I set
a reminder for myself.
[16:18] And so as soon as that time came up,
[16:20] I'm not gonna email him on
the exact day, but it's like,
[16:24] I saw a notification that
Tim had opened my email.
[16:28] There's notifications like
that and when that happens,
[16:30] it triggers, it sends me
an email so I was like,
[16:32] oh yeah, I'm supposed to email him.
[16:34] So I was like, hey Tim, I was
just thinking about whatever
[16:36] and then, you know, wondering if
there's been any progress on that
[16:40] and then he's like, I don't
think we're gonna do that now
[16:43] but we need somebody to
create video content.
[16:45] And I was like, alright,
I've done a few videos,
[16:48] and we were talking and I think in total
[16:49] it was eight or nine
months before we were like,
[16:51] alright let's do this.
[16:52] Yeah, it was like the
slowest hiring process ever.
[16:57] And so, it's just and then from there,
like for the first few months
[17:00] we didn't really know what we were doing.
[17:01] So we experimented with
a few things and then,
[17:04] now the videos that you
guys get every week,
[17:07] is the product of a year's worth of work.
[17:10] (laughing)
[17:10] And so, yeah, that's kind of the
making of how I joined Ahrefs
[17:14] and yeah, it's been kind of interesting.
[17:17] Yeah, I think from my end,
there is a takeaway that,
[17:23] like when I opened position for Funnel Hacker,
[17:27] to be honest it wasn't like
some deep thinking behind it,
[17:31] so I just knew, like I said,
I'm not an expert like in any
[17:35] particular thing, I know a
little bit of here and there,
[17:38] but when I want to start
working on something,
[17:42] I want to actually dig
a little bit into it
[17:45] to understand like what we're doing
[17:47] and to have the
responsibility for doing it.
[17:50] So, when I posted the
ad for Funnel Hacker,
[17:53] kind of my intention was to
speak to people and to see if
[17:57] anyone will be able to persuade
me that he will help us.
[18:01] So, when Sam reached out
and we started talking
[18:05] and we started discussing funnels,
[18:07] actually in the process of
talking to Sam I was able to
[18:11] understand that I don't
believe in funnels for Ahrefs,
[18:15] at least at the time of like what was happening
[18:20] to the company at that moment.
[18:21] To be honest, I still don't believe
[18:23] in funnels for Ahrefs at this time
[18:24] I'm working on it.
[18:25] Yeah, Sam is working on it, but yeah,
[18:27] like our conversations as we
were going back and forth,
[18:31] Sam was pretty open like with
devoting a little bit of his time
[18:36] to come up with ideas, to
record me some screencasts,
[18:39] to walk me through what
kind of ideas he has,
[18:42] because like I know that a lot
of people are super afraid
[18:46] to share their ideas up front.
[18:48] Like, if I am going to share
my ideas with this company,
[18:51] they will just steal my
ideas and don't hire me.
[18:54] Like it almost never happens
because when you want to
[18:57] get hired to some company,
they want to hire you
[18:59] because they don't have the
bandwidth to do it themselves.
[19:02] It's not always that
they're lacking ideas,
[19:05] they are lacking good people to like act,
[19:08] to perform on these ideas.
[19:11] So Sam was pretty open,
discussing like anything he could do
[19:14] for us, so I asked him like, what do you think like,
[19:18] how the funnel would look like?
[19:19] So he would break down the funnel for me,
[19:22] I would ask him like some other questions like,
[19:25] do you think this part of
the funnel makes sense?
[19:27] What if these people will
appear in the funnel?
[19:29] How would you automate it?
[19:31] Do you understand the
resources that we have?
[19:33] Do you understand like if we
will need designer for that?
[19:37] If we will need to record videos for that?
[19:39] If we will need to support
it somehow with blog content?
[19:42] So we were discussing all
these bits and in the process
[19:44] of discussion I was realizing
that like funnels it's not something
[19:49] we want to like invest our
marketing resources into
[19:53] but what I did realize is
that Sam was pretty familiar
[19:56] with Ahrefs, that Sam was
pretty good presenter, that Sam like,
[20:01] I think another advice that
I've heard from like hiring articles
[20:06] or hiring books is that
you should hire a person
[20:09] who can write great emails.
[20:12] So if you send the person
an email with some questions
[20:18] and you get a reply and
reply is structured,
[20:20] and they're addressing like every
single question that you had
[20:23] for them, and they're
not leaving out anything,
[20:26] and they're not adding
any irrelevant stuff
[20:29] that will just waste your time,
[20:31] just by communication with
that person you can see like
[20:33] how good they are.
[20:34] If they're like, if
they will execute well,
[20:36] if they will listen to
you, if they will, kind of, comply
[20:42] and agree with you on everything,
[20:43] or if they have their own opinions.
[20:45] So a lot can be understood
just by communicating
[20:48] with the person via email.
[20:49] So what I understood is
that Sam is like very organized,
[20:53] that he is a good presenter,
[20:54] he recorded quite a few
samples of videos for me.
[20:57] So when I realized that we
don't really need funnels
[21:01] in the definition of like what
funnels mean in marketing
[21:06] but we still need educational materials,
[21:09] we still need to educate people
[21:12] not just with text content but
with video content as well.
[21:16] And then Sam popped out again
[21:19] and suggested to continue
the conversation about how
[21:23] he could contribute and how
he could give value to Ahrefs.
[21:27] We kind of, the second time
we agreed like much more easily
[21:31] than when we were talking
about funnels specifically.
[21:34] So because the second time
Sam was willing to simply
[21:37] explore like how his expertise,
how his abilities would be
[21:43] helpful to Ahrefs. And
we found the position
[21:48] quite easily compared to like
Funnel Hacker position.
[21:52] Okay, do you want to add any extra
[21:54] like takeaways?
[21:56] Any extra takeaways to that.
[22:00] Persistence I guess is one thing.
[22:02] Beats resistance.
[22:03] Yeah, yeah absolutely.
[22:04] But I think that, it's not
that I was desperate to get a
[22:09] job or anything like
that. It was just like,
[22:12] oh I remember this, I like Ahrefs,
[22:14] I really loved the tool before, you know,
[22:17] I had ever spoken with you.
[22:18] Actually, do you remember the very
first email that I sent you?
[22:22] Not really.
[22:23] Okay, so the very first
email that I sent to Tim,
[22:27] and I think that this is a
good lesson for outreach,
[22:29] is that people often approach outreach
[22:31] with a motivation to
receive something, right?
[22:34] Yeah.
[22:35] So, like give me a link, give me
a share, whatever it may be.
[22:40] And so I went through this
process where it's like,
[22:42] nobody knows me in the
internet marketing space,
[22:44] all my stuff is with small/medium size businesses,
[22:47] and so if I want to start
to connect with people,
[22:52] I have to start speaking
to them like a human being.
[22:54] And so I sent Tim an
email and I just said,
[22:58] hey I really respect the
work that you do at Ahrefs,
[23:01] like I love the tool, love the blog,
[23:03] love the content that
you're producing, that's it.
[23:05] And when I did that, he wrote back to me,
[23:07] what he doesn't remember,
but he said something like,
[23:10] hey, like thanks so much, you made my day.
[23:13] Maybe he says that to everyone but...
[23:14] [laughing]
[23:15] No I actually, I cannot say
that I get a lot of praise
[23:19] like every day I open my
email box and I'm like,
[23:22] oh not again, they're
praising me for my work.
[23:25] It doesn't happen too often
so, when I reply to someone
[23:28] and say, thank you, you've made my day,
[23:30] it's pretty genuine.
[23:32] Yeah, and that's the thing
though, it's like, when he responds back
[23:36] I don't reply, by the way
you have a broken link,
[23:39] do you want to replace it with mine?
[23:41] So it's not like a, there's no
[23:44] motivation to get something
back, it's just an introduction.
[23:47] And so whether he
recognized my name or not,
[23:50] when the Funnel Hacker position went in,
[23:52] maybe he did subconsciously,
maybe he doesn't
[23:54] remember now because it was
well over a year ago.
[23:56] I need to pull conversation history.
[23:58] Yeah.
[23:59] And so, I feel like small
things like that help with
[24:03] just in general just networking
and meeting people.
[24:06] And people often see "email scripts"
[24:08] and I hate those two words together.
[24:11] It's just an email right?
[24:12] And I find that people
often forget about that.
[24:16] And I know this is kind of
going off on a tangent,
[24:19] but I think that it is related in the sense
[24:21] that we were just
communicating through email.
[24:24] And often, an introduction
email to someone can help
[24:28] recognize a name or face,
or whatever it may be.
[24:31] I thought that it actually
helped when I approached you,
[24:34] originally, maybe not.
[24:36] [laughing]
[24:38] Okay, so I think we can wrap
it up, probably with some
[24:42] general lessons
out of our conversation.
[24:45] And actually like, while we were
talking and discussing this,
[24:48] and since you shared your
approach that you were basically
[24:52] trying to get leads for your agency,
[24:54] I thought that actually
the same stuff pretty much
[24:58] applies for getting leads to your agency.
[25:02] It doesn't always depend on you because
[25:05] some companies, they are open
to outsourcing their work
[25:09] to agencies, other companies prefer
[25:12] to have it in-house no matter what.
[25:14] And it also, I think, it
also partially depends
[25:19] on the type of service
that you're offering.
[25:21] Because in terms of educational materials,
[25:24] we definitely wanted to have it in house.
[25:26] However, there's a guy called
Bryan Harris, from Videofruit,
[25:31] and his story is that he
basically started offering
[25:34] explanatory videos to Kissmetrics, I believe.
[25:38] Yeah.
[25:39] So he was able to persuade
this kind of company to do
[25:44] videos for them while
being, call it an agency,
[25:47] or outsourced, or contractor,
[25:49] or whatever you like to call it.
[25:51] So let's wrap it up with some lessons.
[25:53] Whether you want to get companies
as leads, as your clients
[25:59] or whether you want to establish
like long-form relationship,
[26:03] be it like an in-house or
you guys are actually
[26:05] outsourced, you work from
the comfort of your homes.
[26:08] I work from the comfort of our office,
[26:11] I think it's quite comfortable.
[26:12] So like you see we have different situations,
[26:15] and depending like on your goals,
I think you might learn
[26:19] some lessons from our conversation
[26:20] and from three of our stories.
[26:22] But maybe Sam can wrap up some lessons.
[26:26] Yeah, so I think in
terms of lead generation
[26:29] for SEO agencies, it doesn't
really matter what you do.
[26:33] A lot of it is in, I want
to use the word persuasion,
[26:38] but it's not in a sleazy kind of way.
[26:40] It's kind of like the
way that you persuaded Josh,
[26:43] you asked him a question
to make him think,
[26:45] like what is my motivation, and
maybe, I don't know what your
[26:49] thoughts were but maybe you're
like, maybe writing for Ahrefs
[26:53] I have a platform that
has an existing audience
[26:55] where I don't have to, you know, hustle as hard.
[26:59] Well, I think it was more that just
I knew that they had kind of the
[27:03] resource available to kind of
just allow me to do great work.
[27:07] Yeah.
[27:08] And that's just what I want
to do, like I said before,
[27:10] that's why I spent so
many months just writing
[27:13] a crazy-long article because I just wanted
[27:15] to put something great out there.
[27:16] I suppose when I was doing
that I was just thinking like, you know,
[27:20] I just want to do something
that people notice,
[27:22] people care about, so...
[27:25] I'd say, okay, let me try to recap.
[27:28] First, is to reach out, so the
more people to reach out to,
[27:33] the more companies you reach out to,
[27:34] the higher the chance that someone will reply.
[27:37] Because it's not always, it
doesn't always depend on you,
[27:40] it also depends on the company.
[27:42] They might be, they might not be in the
[27:45] stage where they're
willing to hire someone.
[27:48] Like you might be emailing
them at the wrong time.
[27:50] So first, just send more outreach emails.
[27:54] Second, don't be afraid to share you ideas,
[27:58] because like sharing your ideas like,
[28:00] don't worry no one will steal them
[28:02] because it's execution that matters,
[28:05] it's not your ideas that matter,
[28:06] so feel free to like write them your best ideas on what you can
[28:09] do like with their company, what kind
of value you can contribute.
[28:14] Because unless you do, how would they know like
[28:16] if you'll be helpful to them or not?
[28:19] Third, actually spend some
of your time to do some work
[28:24] for them, not just offer your ideas,
[28:26] but do some work for them.
[28:28] In case of Sam, like we just
discussed, we talked for like almost
[28:32] a year back and forth, so he
wasted a lot of time just
[28:36] talking to me. And actually
it was mutually beneficial
[28:38] because I was learning something from Sam,
[28:40] Sam was learning something from me.
[28:42] So it's not like a zero-sum game that
[28:44] you're just offering your
expertise, your advice,
[28:47] and you're getting nothing in return.
[28:48] Of course, you will get
something in return,
[28:51] in any case, or at least
you can just agree on some
[28:54] small paid gig, like without
a super high commitment.
[29:00] One, two, three.
[29:01] Do some work and like that's it from me, three.
[29:06] What's your biggest takeaway from
[29:07] your experience with Dmitry, I guess?
[29:13] Hmm...
[29:17] Cut this part, make it seem that like
[29:18] I answered almost instantly.
[29:20] [laughing]
[29:21] Don't move, go back to that position.
[29:24] No, we should actually leave it.
[29:28] Well, I don't even know if
there's any main takeaway
[29:32] I just enjoyed like building
something from scratch.
[29:36] I enjoyed coming to the
company relatively early
[29:40] and I enjoyed kind of the freedom
that I had with Dmitry,
[29:45] to do stuff that I want,
to hire people that I like,
[29:52] so, yeah, probably, I guess a lot of
people are dreaming of like their own
[29:57] business and like they hate nine to five job,
[29:59] I have a nine to five job, I don't hate it at all.
[30:03] I get to do like what I like doing,
I get like much more benefits
[30:09] compared to if I was
launching my own products.
[30:11] I think like Ahrefs was kind of like
a trampoline for me,
[30:16] because if I tried to do these
kinds of things on my own,
[30:19] it would take me like much, much more time.
[30:22] So don't shy away from "jobs,"
they can be awesome, actually.
[30:28] And they can kick start
like whatever you want to do next,
[30:32] because like it's not that everyone
will stay at their job
[30:35] for like their whole life,
which is not bad as well,
[30:40] if you feel that you're
progressing at your work
[30:42] and like something interesting is happening
[30:45] and it fulfills you,
so it's not a problem.
[30:48] So yeah, I think the main
takeaway for me is that
[30:51] nine to five job can be awesome,
you can have flexibility,
[30:56] you can have a lot of
perks, you can have freedom,
[31:00] like, so that's my takeaway.
[31:04] Josh?
[31:06] I guess my takeaway would
just be to actually do
[31:09] something just without someone
telling me to do something.
[31:12] Just create something or do
something that you want to do,
[31:15] that's likely to lead to the
kind of job or result or offer
[31:19] that you want to actually
get in your life.
[31:21] Just put something out there,
[31:23] put in the work without
being told to basically.
[31:27] Yeah.
[31:29] For me, I would say that it's
[31:31] persistence without being annoying, right?
[31:34] It's... There are people who... Have
you, guys, been in those
[31:37] email sequences... not email
sequences, but like... I guess, they are
[31:40] sequences from one person doing outreach,
[31:42] but they don't stop sending
you follow-up emails.
[31:44] Yeah, 12 follow up emails, oh no.
[31:47] It's like, oh man, and
even though it goes to spam,
[31:50] sometimes it comes back,
I don't know, anyway,
[31:52] the idea is basically like, so
number one for SEO agencies,
[31:57] like one thing would
be to understand intent
[31:59] and I guess that happens with SEO anyways
[32:01] that you're always
looking at search intent,
[32:03] but to understand intent
on the lead level. I think.
[32:06] It actually helps in
whatever it comes out to be.
[32:11] In this case, for me like, this
is employment for me,
[32:15] and it's the first time I've been
[32:16] employed I think in my entire life.
[32:18] The same for me.
[32:19] Yeah.
[32:20] And so it's a strange
feeling, but yeah that would be
[32:26] probably my main takeaway,
[32:27] is persistence without being annoying.
[32:31] I know it sounds like a
weird takeaway but yeah,
[32:34] I feel like there is value in that.
[32:37] OK, and I think that can
wrap up this conversation.
[32:41] Maybe we should all say
that it was like super random,
[32:44] so if we shared a lot
of unnecessary details,
[32:48] that bored someone, sorry.
[32:52] Unless we'll cut them out like in the process.
[32:56] But, yeah, if you liked what
you just heard, tell us,
[32:59] probably we'll find a chance
to record more of this stuff,
[33:03] or maybe answer any other
questions that you may have.
[33:06] So yeah, give us some feedback
[33:07] if we should continue
this kind of content.
[33:11] That's all, let's wave bye-bye.
[33:13] [laughing]

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