We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Anatoly Zadorozhnyy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Anatoly below.

Anatoly, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

The road to success isn’t easy, but believe it or not, some basic ground rules can make an enormous difference. It’s all about cultivating the right mindset to keep yourself moving forward when others give up and get left behind. Becoming successful is your responsibility and yours alone, so don’t think anyone owes you anything. It’s up to you to build your success on your own. Don’t take advice from people who don’t have the success or qualities you admire. Nowadays, everyone seems to have advice that they seldom bother to follow themselves. Always believe that you can accomplish anything. You might not have the skills and wisdom today, but the more you see and do, the more you will learn and grow until your skills and your knowledge match your appetite. Don’t waste time comparing your success to that of others. We all start the game with different advantages and disadvantages, so their reality is not the same as yours. Focus on what you’ve got and what you can do. Compete with your previous achievements rather than the achievements of others. Success comes from playing the cards you were dealt with, so you should only compete with yourself.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m the owner of Marketing1on1, a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO and online marketing solutions. I started Marketing1on1 by accident. The year was 2010. As a broke computer science university student, I was building websites for small businesses as a side hustle. My primary source of leads was Craigslist. Everything was going well, but then Craigslist went paid, so I was sitting at my computer trying to find other “free” channels to generate leads. SEO was the next best bet, so I dove into it headfirst. What I discovered is that there was a significant need for SEO services for most businesses, so I spent hours on end learning everything I could about SEO. I was creating multiple affiliate and AdSense sites and ranking them, because back then, affiliate marketing was very popular among SEO professionals. However, affiliate marketing became unstable a few years later, and became somewhat “blackhat”, so in 2012, I decided to start Marketing1on1 and help businesses grow their organic traffic through SEO. Before starting Marketing1on1, I wanted to be sure that I could deliver results for my potential clients. I didn’t want to be like most SEO companies that use clients as their trial and error, so I took the whole first year of 2012 to perfect my strategies and rank my own company, Marketing1on1, before opening up my services to businesses. I also always focused on inbound/organic leads; I never solicited or cold-called businesses pitching my services. My motto was always “if you are good at your craft, the customers will follow”, similar to Google’s stand, “if your content is good you’ll get traffic”.

Have you ever had to pivot?

SEO moves a thousand miles per hour. What used to work yesterday might not work today. If you are in the SEO industry, you have to learn, grow, and pivot your business more often than others. For example, we mainly used to offer link-building services to other SEO companies vs full-blown SEO campaigns to businesses. It was easier because we didn’t have to get on the meetings, only send out link-building reports. In 2016, the whole link-building industry started to see a major decline, and a lot of SEO companies closed down, so we had to pivot and offer full SEO campaigns directly to the customer. Same thing we see now with content generation due to AI. A lot of content writers are pivoting to just “proofreading” AI-generated content vs actually writing the content.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy for growing our clientele has been value and results. We never cold-called or mass-spammed businesses with offers. All of our work either comes from referrals or our own SEO work. I always wanted to focus on people already searching for my services, rather than trying to sell and explain the value of SEO / internet marketing to someone who doesn’t even know what it is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.marketing1on1.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketing1on1/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Marketing1on1/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anatoly-zadorozhnyy-b7615482
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/marketing1_on_1/