What's up guys? It's Sam Oh here, and today
we're joined by about half of the Ahrefs Marketing crew.
First time that Josh and I have met, as well as Tim.
So we've never met each other.
But we're here in Singapore, and we're just talking about kind of
how we joined Ahrefs and just kind of our journey along the way,
and I guess how we all got to meet today
and for that reason.
So today we're just here to discuss kind of our own stories,
share our marketing journeys and hopefully to
help you guys out with, I guess, finding your dream job or
no, that's not right, I guess.
[laughing]
So yeah... So, basically...
You mean it's not your dream job?
[laughing]
It's not my dream job.
Basically just helping you guys to progress in your careers
and, yeah, just if you guys can take anything actionable away from
our stories and the things that we share today, awesome.
If not, enjoy the show!
[upbeat music]
Yeah, so why don't we get started with Tim?
How did you start with Ahrefs?
Okay so, this is the question I get asked quite often,
basically, when I meet any new people,
eventually everything will come to that question
like how did you end up with Ahrefs, like what's your story?
Especially since I am from Ukraine,
and now I'm working for a company that like does global stuff,
so how did it all go?
I actually, I've been to SEO and digital marketing
for I think nine years right now,
and it all started from some junior SEO role.
When I was trying to learn SEO myself,
reading different blogs, watching videos,
and trying out like my small new websites,
for like Amazon Affiliates, for just banner advertising
back when you could make money with banner advertising
and all that stuff, and fast forward a few years,
when I had enough experience, and enough like money in my account
to create something on my own,
I started my personal blog,
and I started some projects on my own, and I even launched
a tool that was supposed to be kind of BuzzSumo competitor,
but at that time I didn't know even that BuzzSumo exists,
because it was like I think four or five years ago,
so I've never heard of BuzzSumo, but I wanted to create a tool
where you would plug someone's blog, and it would show you
the most popular articles on that blog.
Because like back then no one was doing it but everyone wanted
to know like what gets popular on social media,
what gets more tweets, likes,
it was shortly after Facebook and Twitter introduced their
Tweet and Like buttons that all the websites implemented.
So it was like a thing.
And as I was releasing these kinds of projects
and working on my personal blog, I was doing outreach.
So classic outreach to get links,
classic outreach to get guest articles,
to get mentions, and all that stuff.
And in the process of outreach I reached out to
Ahrefs blog. Back then it was handled by Helen,
she works in support. She was doing these roundups of links,
like, "Here's what like weekly stuff that was happening in the SEO
and the marketing space."
And she was listing some interesting articles.
So I reached out to her and I knew that Ahrefs
is company that comes from Ukraine,
that the founder is Ukrainian,
because I've read a few of his interviews online.
So I basically wrote kind of cheesy email saying that like
I'm a fellow Ukrainian and we should help each other,
like some bonding and all that stuff.
I don't remember what exactly I wanted,
if I showed them my article or if I showed them my tool,
or whatever it was,
but I think I got featured in this kind of roundup
and shortly after this I got an email from
Ahrefs founder and CEO Dmitry,
who said that he researched me a little bit,
he likes my work and he invited me
to kind of write a few articles for Ahrefs
and see if we can work together.
So, this is how it all started, like so it's not me who suggested
to work for Ahrefs, it's Dmitry who actually researched
my work. He actually saw that I had published articles
on Moz blog and that article had won some awards,
so I think this impressed him and he kind of wanted
to try working with me, and actually quite fast,
I think within two weeks, maybe three weeks max,
as I started digging into Ahrefs tools,
I saw a lot of things that I didn't think were quite right.
So I wanted to improve them
and I messaged Dmitry all the time,
like I don't think like your homepage copy is great.
I don't think that what you're publishing
on your blog is great.
I don't think that you're like explaining the metrics
in the interface well, and all that stuff.
Or like suggesting some kind of features,
like it would be fun to have this kind of filter here,
it would be fun to have this kind of report.
And so basically within like two or three weeks,
like I started working more and more with Ahrefs
and not only kind of writing some articles for them but also
contributing to the actual product development
and creating the website, website copy,
working on pricing page and all that little stuff.
And Dmitry, shortly after, offered me to come to Singapore
and to be in charge of marketing.
"Be in charge of marketing", I would say, quote unquote
because I was the only marketing person
when I came to Singapore.
Shortly before I came to Singapore, the woman that was
working in Ahrefs marketing, she left for another company,
so basically there was no one for me to work with
and I was the only person.
So this is how it all started for me.
I started working myself on pretty much everything,
like on homepage copy, on YouTube channel, on blog, on hints,
reports, feature requests, design,
like I was doing everything like myself.
And then, with time,
I got to like hiring people who would help me,
who are better than myself at something,
and this is how these two guys ended up here.
So I think between you two, Josh was the next hire.
Yes. Yeah.
So, Josh, do you want to tell the story from your end,
because I've seen how it happened from my end.
Yeah, so I think it was like a couple of years ago now,
I was working on like a big link building strategies
that's kind of post, that hopefully
some of you might have seen at some point,
and, yeah, I spent like five months creating that
and then published it on my own blog.
Five months.
Yeah, like on and off for five months.
It was like 60,000 words.
Yeah it was huge.
Too much really, but then I think you reached out to me, Tim,
in like 2016, like mid-2016, like September or something,
yeah 2016, and you said, you know,
do I wanna write a post for the Ahrefs blog
and I kind of did and it just all kind of went on from there.
So I was like freelancing until earlier this year,
freelancing, just doing writing for the blog
and then kind of officially got hired earlier this year.
So now... I'm now head of content which basically just means that
I'm doing more of the same thing.
But yeah.
Yeah, so.
I think the interesting bit that you're overlooking is
that I actually asked you,
like what's your motivation to publish such a huge article?
How do you say, how long it was?
60k words?
Yeah, 60,000 words.
Yeah, so it was a huge article there was a lot of content,
there was like a ton of work invested there, and it was
published at basically a blog that was just launched.
Yeah.
There was nothing there but this article
and I wrote an email to Josh and like said,
like what's your motivation in doing this kind of work?
Do you think that you can get like better ROI if you write for us?
Do you want like to build kind of your credibility in the niche?
Do you want to kind of end up creating some kind of paid courses?
Or like do you want to scale your agency?
Like whatever you do, I see that you are like willing to invest
a lot of work, so I'm sure that we can figure out
between you and Ahrefs a way where like each of us will benefit.
Yeah.
And so I think this was persuasive enough
for Josh to join.
Yeah.
Yeah, so basically I just like to do good work,
that's all that really drives me to do anything really,
I just want to make something that's good
and then that, you know, people actually want to read and benefit from
and you kind of just give me the ability to do that,
you just give me the freedom to do that
and like the resources to do that.
So there's nothing that could be better really,
from my point of view, because that's why I enjoy
just creating something and just putting something out there
for people to read and learn from.
Yeah, and actually I think one other interesting thing
that I want to share right now is that usually
when you read some kind of hiring advice,
the most common advice that they give you is
that you should hire people better than you.
But it's like super hard,
like if you're quite knowledgeable in what you do,
it's super hard to find people who are better than you.
But in case of Josh, it was like the actual case
when I realized that this guy can produce
content like way better than I am.
And one other thing is that Josh has like some experience
with stuff that I don't know anything about,
like scrapping, Google Sheets, working with different tools.
So I don't have a lot of experience with that,
I'm more like a generalist, so I know kind of the basics of
here and there and I can connect the dots
but if you dig a little bit deeper,
my knowledge is not so good.
So this is why I was like super happy to find Josh,
and I really, before Josh, I was struggling to find someone
for Ahrefs blog, who would have like more experience than me
in SEO and except for that would be able to
kind of write it in an article, in a good article.
Because a lot of people have better experience than me
in SEO, like it's not that hard to be better than myself at SEO,
especially technical SEO,
but like combine that with ability to explain yourself
and to write like great article, that's rare.
So, like I kind of took the proactive approach,
I didn't just post a few ads on different sites,
that we're looking for like Head of Content,
we're looking for Blog Editor,
who would take our blog to next level, blah blah blah.
Actually I did post this kind of things.
Yeah, I think I saw a posting like that.
Yeah, I did post these kinds of ads,
but like it wasn't working, I saw that everyone who applied
wasn't really what I was looking for, so when I saw Josh
published this like huge, monstrous article I kind of knew
that I should like hire this guy immediately and I was lucky that
he only published one article on his blog.
He didn't invest like enough time, and money, and resources
into his blog to be willing to abandon it afterwards.
So I think some luck was also involved there.
Yeah, I think that's some pretty good advice that
you mentioned: "Someone who's better than you."
And so Josh didn't come up to you and say,
like I'm better than you at SEO so, you know, you should hire me.
Yeah.
But he just kind of proved himself through it.
And I think for startups, for small mid-size companies
that's often what they're looking for,
is someone who's self-sufficient and you know,
can direct it with minimal supervision I guess,
minimal training, and I think that's really good,
is that you were able to go out
and create a 60,000-word post.
Yeah.
I can't even call it a post, like that probably took like,
your page speed was probably like 25 seconds
just to load that text but you know,
is to be able to go out there, be proactive,
just to do it, to show that, you know, you're more than
knowledgeable enough, what's the word that I'm looking for...
Self-sufficient?
I don't know if it's the right word but I think you guys...
No problem, English is your first language,
it's OK for you to not to know all this.
It's okay, I'm trying, I'm just trying. [laughing]
Yeah, but anyway. So for me...
For you.
Very, very different story, so...
Ok, tell them that I don't know it, because you told us.
Tim doesn't know it.
Three times, that I don't know how
I don't think I know the full story.
Yeah, so like I told Tim, I kept telling Tim, you don't know it,
and so I kind of wanted him to say,
you wanna give me a heads up before,
so this is the first time that Tim's hearing this.
Okay, so basically I come from a background,
originally I started online marketing end of 2008,
and so I started to build my own company,
sold it off, the typical story that you hear from
the younger generation now of internet marketers.
And so I experimented quite a bit,
And I was trying to figure out, what is it that I enjoy doing.
It is SEO, CRO, lead gen, because when I started
my first business I knew absolutely nothing,
I kind of had to learn everything on my own.
And so I eventually settled on lead generation,
particularly in CRO and so,
I started doing my own little projects and stuff,
eventually got a lucky break with a company that would
send me leads and so I would just do agency type work.
And then from there, I just started doing lead gen.
I started my own personal blog,
and then I was like, I have a really cool idea,
and so like I tend to come up with like ideas, that I think
are pretty creative, I don't know if these guys think so
but I think that they're pretty creative,
and so I was like, you know what,
if I wanted to get a new client for agency work,
what if I look at the intention.
So the intention is, if you look at a job post,
you already know that they're trying to hire someone.
So, if I do that and the intent is already there,
then it must be easier to close.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
And so, I was looking through like some of my blogs,
and the blogs that I like, and the websites,
and I was already an Ahrefs customer for a few years
and I saw a position for a Funnel Hacker.
And so I was like, interesting, funnels,
I can do funnels, that's easy,
I'm probably, you know, better than the average person, you know,
who does like one drip sequence
and that's considered a funnel, which it's not.
But then I was like, cool, so I emailed Tim
and I basically just said hey,
I answered all his questions, hey here's my funnel,
sent him a video,
I don't know if other people sent you videos,
or if you even had other applications.
No, I don't think I had too many applications,
just a few and I don't even remember if they sent me
any videos at all.
Yeah, so I sent him a video, kind of just walking him
through it, and we were just sending emails back and forth
and so like, my whole intention this time was,
Ahrefs would be a great client to have, right?
And Tim's, I'm guessing your intent was,
we're looking for someone to hire like an employee.
Yeah.
And so we had different things
and so I was like you know what, it doesn't matter,
it's more or less the same thing.
It's just a matter of the way that you look at it.
And so we ended up talking and we talked
for about four months.
I think maybe more, it was a lot of back and forth.
It was four months and then you said,
we don't want that right now
and I was like, no problem, that's cool.
And so, you're like but we may open that position up
a few months later, so I was like, sounds good.
So Tim didn't follow up, and so of course,
being in lead gen, I was like, I set a reminder for myself.
And so as soon as that time came up,
I'm not gonna email him on the exact day, but it's like,
I saw a notification that Tim had opened my email.
There's notifications like that and when that happens,
it triggers, it sends me an email so I was like,
oh yeah, I'm supposed to email him.
So I was like, hey Tim, I was just thinking about whatever
and then, you know, wondering if there's been any progress on that
and then he's like, I don't think we're gonna do that now
but we need somebody to create video content.
And I was like, alright, I've done a few videos,
and we were talking and I think in total
it was eight or nine months before we were like,
alright let's do this.
Yeah, it was like the slowest hiring process ever.
And so, it's just and then from there, like for the first few months
we didn't really know what we were doing.
So we experimented with a few things and then,
now the videos that you guys get every week,
is the product of a year's worth of work.
(laughing)
And so, yeah, that's kind of the making of how I joined Ahrefs
and yeah, it's been kind of interesting.
Yeah, I think from my end, there is a takeaway that,
like when I opened position for Funnel Hacker,
to be honest it wasn't like some deep thinking behind it,
so I just knew, like I said, I'm not an expert like in any
particular thing, I know a little bit of here and there,
but when I want to start working on something,
I want to actually dig a little bit into it
to understand like what we're doing
and to have the responsibility for doing it.
So, when I posted the ad for Funnel Hacker,
kind of my intention was to speak to people and to see if
anyone will be able to persuade me that he will help us.
So, when Sam reached out and we started talking
and we started discussing funnels,
actually in the process of talking to Sam I was able to
understand that I don't believe in funnels for Ahrefs,
at least at the time of like what was happening
to the company at that moment.
To be honest, I still don't believe
in funnels for Ahrefs at this time
I'm working on it.
Yeah, Sam is working on it, but yeah,
like our conversations as we were going back and forth,
Sam was pretty open like with devoting a little bit of his time
to come up with ideas, to record me some screencasts,
to walk me through what kind of ideas he has,
because like I know that a lot of people are super afraid
to share their ideas up front.
Like, if I am going to share my ideas with this company,
they will just steal my ideas and don't hire me.
Like it almost never happens because when you want to
get hired to some company, they want to hire you
because they don't have the bandwidth to do it themselves.
It's not always that they're lacking ideas,
they are lacking good people to like act,
to perform on these ideas.
So Sam was pretty open, discussing like anything he could do
for us, so I asked him like, what do you think like,
how the funnel would look like?
So he would break down the funnel for me,
I would ask him like some other questions like,
do you think this part of the funnel makes sense?
What if these people will appear in the funnel?
How would you automate it?
Do you understand the resources that we have?
Do you understand like if we will need designer for that?
If we will need to record videos for that?
If we will need to support it somehow with blog content?
So we were discussing all these bits and in the process
of discussion I was realizing that like funnels it's not something
we want to like invest our marketing resources into
but what I did realize is that Sam was pretty familiar
with Ahrefs, that Sam was pretty good presenter, that Sam like,
I think another advice that I've heard from like hiring articles
or hiring books is that you should hire a person
who can write great emails.
So if you send the person an email with some questions
and you get a reply and reply is structured,
and they're addressing like every single question that you had
for them, and they're not leaving out anything,
and they're not adding any irrelevant stuff
that will just waste your time,
just by communication with that person you can see like
how good they are.
If they're like, if they will execute well,
if they will listen to you, if they will, kind of, comply
and agree with you on everything,
or if they have their own opinions.
So a lot can be understood just by communicating
with the person via email.
So what I understood is that Sam is like very organized,
that he is a good presenter,
he recorded quite a few samples of videos for me.
So when I realized that we don't really need funnels
in the definition of like what funnels mean in marketing
but we still need educational materials,
we still need to educate people
not just with text content but with video content as well.
And then Sam popped out again
and suggested to continue the conversation about how
he could contribute and how he could give value to Ahrefs.
We kind of, the second time we agreed like much more easily
than when we were talking about funnels specifically.
So because the second time Sam was willing to simply
explore like how his expertise, how his abilities would be
helpful to Ahrefs. And we found the position
quite easily compared to like Funnel Hacker position.
Okay, do you want to add any extra
like takeaways?
Any extra takeaways to that.
Persistence I guess is one thing.
Beats resistance.
Yeah, yeah absolutely.
But I think that, it's not that I was desperate to get a
job or anything like that. It was just like,
oh I remember this, I like Ahrefs,
I really loved the tool before, you know,
I had ever spoken with you.
Actually, do you remember the very first email that I sent you?
Not really.
Okay, so the very first email that I sent to Tim,
and I think that this is a good lesson for outreach,
is that people often approach outreach
with a motivation to receive something, right?
Yeah.
So, like give me a link, give me a share, whatever it may be.
And so I went through this process where it's like,
nobody knows me in the internet marketing space,
all my stuff is with small/medium size businesses,
and so if I want to start to connect with people,
I have to start speaking to them like a human being.
And so I sent Tim an email and I just said,
hey I really respect the work that you do at Ahrefs,
like I love the tool, love the blog,
love the content that you're producing, that's it.
And when I did that, he wrote back to me,
what he doesn't remember, but he said something like,
hey, like thanks so much, you made my day.
Maybe he says that to everyone but...
[laughing]
No I actually, I cannot say that I get a lot of praise
like every day I open my email box and I'm like,
oh not again, they're praising me for my work.
It doesn't happen too often so, when I reply to someone
and say, thank you, you've made my day,
it's pretty genuine.
Yeah, and that's the thing though, it's like, when he responds back
I don't reply, by the way you have a broken link,
do you want to replace it with mine?
So it's not like a, there's no
motivation to get something back, it's just an introduction.
And so whether he recognized my name or not,
when the Funnel Hacker position went in,
maybe he did subconsciously, maybe he doesn't
remember now because it was well over a year ago.
I need to pull conversation history.
Yeah.
And so, I feel like small things like that help with
just in general just networking and meeting people.
And people often see "email scripts"
and I hate those two words together.
It's just an email right?
And I find that people often forget about that.
And I know this is kind of going off on a tangent,
but I think that it is related in the sense
that we were just communicating through email.
And often, an introduction email to someone can help
recognize a name or face, or whatever it may be.
I thought that it actually helped when I approached you,
originally, maybe not.
[laughing]
Okay, so I think we can wrap it up, probably with some
general lessons out of our conversation.
And actually like, while we were talking and discussing this,
and since you shared your approach that you were basically
trying to get leads for your agency,
I thought that actually the same stuff pretty much
applies for getting leads to your agency.
It doesn't always depend on you because
some companies, they are open to outsourcing their work
to agencies, other companies prefer
to have it in-house no matter what.
And it also, I think, it also partially depends
on the type of service that you're offering.
Because in terms of educational materials,
we definitely wanted to have it in house.
However, there's a guy called Bryan Harris, from Videofruit,
and his story is that he basically started offering
explanatory videos to Kissmetrics, I believe.
Yeah.
So he was able to persuade this kind of company to do
videos for them while being, call it an agency,
or outsourced, or contractor,
or whatever you like to call it.
So let's wrap it up with some lessons.
Whether you want to get companies as leads, as your clients
or whether you want to establish like long-form relationship,
be it like an in-house or you guys are actually
outsourced, you work from the comfort of your homes.
I work from the comfort of our office,
I think it's quite comfortable.
So like you see we have different situations,
and depending like on your goals, I think you might learn
some lessons from our conversation
and from three of our stories.
But maybe Sam can wrap up some lessons.
Yeah, so I think in terms of lead generation
for SEO agencies, it doesn't really matter what you do.
A lot of it is in, I want to use the word persuasion,
but it's not in a sleazy kind of way.
It's kind of like the way that you persuaded Josh,
you asked him a question to make him think,
like what is my motivation, and maybe, I don't know what your
thoughts were but maybe you're like, maybe writing for Ahrefs
I have a platform that has an existing audience
where I don't have to, you know, hustle as hard.
Well, I think it was more that just I knew that they had kind of the
resource available to kind of just allow me to do great work.
Yeah.
And that's just what I want to do, like I said before,
that's why I spent so many months just writing
a crazy-long article because I just wanted
to put something great out there.
I suppose when I was doing that I was just thinking like, you know,
I just want to do something that people notice,
people care about, so...
I'd say, okay, let me try to recap.
First, is to reach out, so the more people to reach out to,
the more companies you reach out to,
the higher the chance that someone will reply.
Because it's not always, it doesn't always depend on you,
it also depends on the company.
They might be, they might not be in the
stage where they're willing to hire someone.
Like you might be emailing them at the wrong time.
So first, just send more outreach emails.
Second, don't be afraid to share you ideas,
because like sharing your ideas like,
don't worry no one will steal them
because it's execution that matters,
it's not your ideas that matter,
so feel free to like write them your best ideas on what you can
do like with their company, what kind of value you can contribute.
Because unless you do, how would they know like
if you'll be helpful to them or not?
Third, actually spend some of your time to do some work
for them, not just offer your ideas,
but do some work for them.
In case of Sam, like we just discussed, we talked for like almost
a year back and forth, so he wasted a lot of time just
talking to me. And actually it was mutually beneficial
because I was learning something from Sam,
Sam was learning something from me.
So it's not like a zero-sum game that
you're just offering your expertise, your advice,
and you're getting nothing in return.
Of course, you will get something in return,
in any case, or at least you can just agree on some
small paid gig, like without a super high commitment.
One, two, three.
Do some work and like that's it from me, three.
What's your biggest takeaway from
your experience with Dmitry, I guess?
Hmm...
Cut this part, make it seem that like
I answered almost instantly.
[laughing]
Don't move, go back to that position.
No, we should actually leave it.
Well, I don't even know if there's any main takeaway
I just enjoyed like building something from scratch.
I enjoyed coming to the company relatively early
and I enjoyed kind of the freedom that I had with Dmitry,
to do stuff that I want, to hire people that I like,
so, yeah, probably, I guess a lot of people are dreaming of like their own
business and like they hate nine to five job,
I have a nine to five job, I don't hate it at all.
I get to do like what I like doing, I get like much more benefits
compared to if I was launching my own products.
I think like Ahrefs was kind of like a trampoline for me,
because if I tried to do these kinds of things on my own,
it would take me like much, much more time.
So don't shy away from "jobs," they can be awesome, actually.
And they can kick start like whatever you want to do next,
because like it's not that everyone will stay at their job
for like their whole life, which is not bad as well,
if you feel that you're progressing at your work
and like something interesting is happening
and it fulfills you, so it's not a problem.
So yeah, I think the main takeaway for me is that
nine to five job can be awesome, you can have flexibility,
you can have a lot of perks, you can have freedom,
like, so that's my takeaway.
Josh?
I guess my takeaway would just be to actually do
something just without someone telling me to do something.
Just create something or do something that you want to do,
that's likely to lead to the kind of job or result or offer
that you want to actually get in your life.
Just put something out there,
put in the work without being told to basically.
Yeah.
For me, I would say that it's
persistence without being annoying, right?
It's... There are people who... Have you, guys, been in those
email sequences... not email sequences, but like... I guess, they are
sequences from one person doing outreach,
but they don't stop sending you follow-up emails.
Yeah, 12 follow up emails, oh no.
It's like, oh man, and even though it goes to spam,
sometimes it comes back, I don't know, anyway,
the idea is basically like, so number one for SEO agencies,
like one thing would be to understand intent
and I guess that happens with SEO anyways
that you're always looking at search intent,
but to understand intent on the lead level. I think.
It actually helps in whatever it comes out to be.
In this case, for me like, this is employment for me,
and it's the first time I've been
employed I think in my entire life.
The same for me.
Yeah.
And so it's a strange feeling, but yeah that would be
probably my main takeaway,
is persistence without being annoying.
I know it sounds like a weird takeaway but yeah,
I feel like there is value in that.
OK, and I think that can wrap up this conversation.
Maybe we should all say that it was like super random,
so if we shared a lot of unnecessary details,
that bored someone, sorry.
Unless we'll cut them out like in the process.
But, yeah, if you liked what you just heard, tell us,
probably we'll find a chance to record more of this stuff,
or maybe answer any other questions that you may have.
So yeah, give us some feedback
if we should continue this kind of content.
That's all, let's wave bye-bye.
[laughing]
For more infomation >> WWE Evolution Kickoff: October 28, 2018 - Duration: 1:04:04. 
For more infomation >> Prep Sports Extra for Saturday, October 27, 2018 - Duration: 28:24. 
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