Tell us about your career – how did you get started and what are you doing now?
After graduating from university with a philosophy degree, I was working at a t-shirt printing company and I happened to come across a “support tech” job ad for a WordPress plugin company, MailPoet. It seemed interesting, so I applied – and was lucky enough to get hired based on my customer service experience and tech knowledge. I worked as a support tech for a couple years, then gradually switched to writing marketing content, as I was one of the few native English speakers on the team.
Over the next 5-6 years, I worked for a few different WordPress companies, focusing on content and marketing. These days, I am Head of Content at Convesio, a host that specializes in scaling WordPress websites under heavy traffic loads. I manage all of the pages, posts, emails, and other content that we publish.
What do you specialize in? What’s your superpower?
I focus on creating content that leads to sales. A lot of content-creation advice focuses on metrics that have unclear benefits to the actual business. Instead, I prefer to figure out what content directly gets us new customers, and then create it. This has proven to be very useful during sales calls with potential clients.
I also think my background in philosophy has been helpful in writing content, as I learned how to communicate ideas and arguments using clear, unambiguous language.
I’d recommend that anyone looking to be a writer or content creator consider a degree in philosophy for precisely that reason.
Tell us about work you are particularly proud of
I’m quite proud of being a part of Convesio, as we’re a small startup that has grown rapidly over the last couple years. It’s great to see the work I do every day have a direct impact on the growth of the company every month. I definitely much prefer it to a larger firm, where you may work on a project for years but see no direct impact from it.
What’s your favorite brand and why?
It’s from the non-tech world, I really love Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing company. They don’t seem to do much advertising, and they don’t need to. Their shirts, pants, and other items are both minimal and high-quality, which are two of my favorite qualities when it comes to products.
How about your favorite campaign or ad?
Hmm. I think probably the old Nike ads from the 90s. Especially “Failure” (1997) with Michael Jordan and “I am not a role model” (1993) with Charles Barkley. Both are just seem very authentic to me in a way that ads today aren’t.
Can you tell us about a current campaign you are running, or have run recently?
We are growing rapidly in the HIPAA-compliance hosting space, which is essentially a bunch of rules websites have to follow if they are in the healthcare industry. And so we’ve been making a ton of blog posts, videos, and landing pages to explain HIPAA and draw in new clients, including:
What’s your favorite Marketing tool these days, and why?
I’ve seen some really good results from using SurferSEO. Specifically their tool to improve your content pieces. It’s definitely helped get our site up the ranks on Google searches. I prefer it to some other SEO tools that are more popular.
To conclude, can you share a tip that can help WordPress businesses grow?
Try to focus on a niche first, before worrying about bigger markets. There are a lot of profitable niches out there that aren’t “cool” and thus go unnoticed by WordPress entrepreneurs. You’d be surprised how lucrative a small plugin can be – if it solves a serious problem for businesses in a niche industry.
