This will be a long one so buckle up.
I do digital marketing consulting with a focus on SEO. This journey started for me in 2006 almost by accident, but here I am so many years later – still spending a big part of my day curious about how tech and business overlap.
Since 2006, I have gone through a real format spin in doing SEO. First in house, then freelance, then agency, then freelance, then in house again, and now back to agency. It gave me a great 360 view of how the digital marketing industry, the relationships between all stakeholders, and business processes really work.
Right out of college I started my first office job filing US and UK tax returns in the Taxback Group. This was lots of fun, for real, but I guess fun is not hard when you are 23. A few years later in 2006, I applied for an internal position as a website coordinator, to do project management for a ten person web developer team. I had zero idea what it means, up to the point that I had never seen a web or any project in my life. I woke up a month later with 5 huge websites making lots of money online, a dozen people some of them almost twice my age, no project management ,and almost no technical skills. This is how I crushed anxiety before it got trendy.
At the same time I also hustled by helping a web development agency Dotmedia with their digital marketing efforts in 2005, which made me excited about digital marketing.
The week after I got the web coordinator job, I found myself at the end of a chain letter from the company’s founder saying that I should take an SEO course in London because I will also be doing the SEO for the company. Again – I got zero idea what SEO is, so naturally I Googled it. I got crazy excited, and headed to London to get a two-days course.
Long story short, a few years later I was managing the SEO, paid advertising and web teams, and we made some truly great projects together.
In 2007 I felt it was a good time to spin off as a freelancer, and so I did. I made a living through affiliate programs, because 2007 was not really a great time for freelancing digital services. The whole setup did not feel right and was very exhausting, so this adventure lasted less than a year.
I spent another year helping the Dotmedia team with digital marketing before I decided it was a time for a bolder move – to change the city. I left my beautiful home town on the Black Sea, and moved to Sofia.
I started work at one of the most renowned and exciting web agencies at the time – Mag Studio. I also started talking to industry events like the former SEO conference, Webit, BG Site of the Year etc, teaching SEO master degree class in Sofia University, had a column in .net magazine for four years, and me and my newly formed SEO team worked on plenty of projects for some of the top brands in the country.
In 2012 I decided that times are changing fast enough and I will give freelancing another chance. This time it lasted over three years. There was definitely a difference between freelancing in 2007 and 2014. I had the chance to work on some exciting SEO projects for small and large businesses, teaching, speaking, and writing. It was still a very lonely experience though. Co-working and shared communities was existing but not really a thing, while I was wired for much more human interaction than my freelance daily routine offered.
In the middle of 2015 I moved to in house again for yet another three years, starting an SEO manager role at Telerik acquired by Progress. It is safe to say that it is there that I met the most experienced digital marketing professionals I have worked with to date, and we have spent three crazy productive years helping Telerik becoming Progress and the global digital marketing for both.
After the Telerik acquisition by Progress I have felt the need to participate in something new and more challenging, and joined my former Telerik team lead to his newly launched digital marketing agency VertoDigital. I am in my second year in this new venture helping him develop the SEO service in the agency, and enjoying the company of many former Telerik colleagues in the Campus X ecosystem.
Thanks for bearing with me telling you my career story. Although it turned out to be a long one, I feel I barely started.
Note that I only posted pictures of me to escape contacting tens of people and asking for their consent in publishing their picture online.
In reality, I enjoyed the company and support of lovely humans and exceptional professionals every single day!
People are probably my favorite part of this whole thing called career life.