I began learning about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) nearly 10 years ago when it was my 2nd year in the USA, and Oleg, a friend of mine who owned a small window washing company in Winnetka, IL, was struggling to get business through the internet and asked if we could help. My friend Ivan and I studied computer programming at our university. At that time, we had already started to design websites for our friends, and SEO seemed like an awesome opportunity to challenge ourselves.
I started to google how to get leads (a clever search term, I know). It took me about 80 hours over 7 straight days to really grasp the concept of SEO. I met with Oleg one week after his question and said confidently that if he paid me $500 per month, I would get him more leads than he could handle! Of course, I still wasn’t sure how to actually make my promise a reality, but I was confident nonetheless. With Ivan’s help and another 300 hours of study, trial, and error, Ivan and I spent three months getting backlinks from thousands of various article directories (which took $350 out of our profits) and putting keywords in hidden areas of our client’s website. This approach came to be known as “black hat” techniques, neither of which Comrade Digital Marketing practices today. Nevertheless, these links produced the quickest and cheapest results. By the fourth month, my friend was attracting 60 leads/month from SEO. The website that Ivan and I had created showed up on Google’s first page for the term window washing company chicago and many other similar valuable keywords. The additional $500/mo of stable income was infectious. From that point on, Ivan and I knew that this type of recurring revenue was key to our future success. We began offering our SEO services to all our clients. After a couple of years, we were not only building attractive, functional websites but marketing 10 of them on a regular basis.
In 2013, many of our clients who were very happy and profitable with our work began to lose their keyword rankings suddenly. Google had launched its first major anti-spam algorithm named Penguin. Such a cute, harmless term was, in fact, ruining our whole business model. Penguin and subsequent versions seriously changed the SEO game in a short amount of time. We lost several clients as our SEO empire began to crumble.
Honestly, I was bummed out and decided to close our SEO department altogether. Of course, the next logical step was to travel to Tibet! I wanted to figure out what I should do with my life. By hiking, meditating, and eating delicious food, I decided to reinvent myself with a unique strategy for achieving SEO and digital marketing success. I zeroed in on “white hat” techniques, all perfectly aligned and in perfect balance with Google guidelines.
Here is how the industry changed and how I was able to respond, clear-headed from my travels. While not exactly “commandments,” the past 8+ years have demonstrated that these concepts work well, and others do not.
“Do it now! It’s a lot of fun!”
I attended my first Burning Man festival in 2012. It opened my mind, and I returned to Chicago with a couple of new friends (who became employees) and a whole range of new services. My approach was a bold departure from ho-hum marketing campaigns. Our creativity was burning at a high level, and I became intent on making Comrade Digital Marketing a viable one-stop shop for companies’ digital marketing needs.
Address: 770 N Halsted Street, Ste 106,
Chicago, IL 60642
Website: ComradeWeb.com
Phone: (312) 265-0580
Email: info@comradeweb.com
Instagram: comradeweb
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ComradeWeb/
You can read RankWatch’s full interview on Stan here.
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