Today we’d like to introduce you to Craig Campbell.
It’s an honor to speak with you today. Why don’t you give us some details about you and your story. How did you get to where you are today?
I stared out in this business working from home, not having a clue what I was doing. Im completely self taught so I spent around 4 years learning SEO from my bedroom not really making much money. Before I knew it I needed a sales guy, a content writer, a web developer and an office space. So just as a natural progression I was building a business ( which I wasn’t setting out on doing ). For 9 years after this I had built up a successful Digital Marketing Agency, learning about hiring people, firing people and trying to win new business to keep everyone in a job.
At the time I wasn’t a huge success as I wasn’t really a business man, I had no clue what I was doing, I didnt have any internal training for staff, I had no processes or procedures and it simply was a whole bunch of stress if I’m honest.
I thought there had to be easier ways to make money, hence why I stared offering consultancy, training and working with agencies to show them what not to do, after 9 years of making mistake after mistake in my own agency and this worked really well.
I added in affiliate marketing to make sure I was getting consistent cashflow coming into my business.
I then realised buying online businesses was like buying properties, I could buy and sell them all day long.
And that’s where I’m at today.
I’m sure your success has not come easily. What challenges have you had to overcome along the way?
Some of the challenges ive had over the years has been with people, so hiring the right people and thinking I had to do that locally was an issue. Getting people in to do a solid says graft is hard, well it was hard for me I didnt have much luck with that.
But ontop of that the processes and SOP’s within my business were not in place, so I wasn’t really helping myself, the staff were doing what they thought they should be doing and were not getting any real in detail guidance from me personally and that’s completely my fault.
When I was running my agency, cashflow was a problem, I didnt have clients signed up on contracts and they would pay when they wanted if they wanted and that added a whole bunch of stress along the way.
My own ego was also a problem over the years, whilst running an agency, I wasn’t one for delegating anything, I wanted everything to run through me. I essentially built myself into the business which isn’t ideal. You want to work on your business not in it. The business was over-reliant on me being there and as a business owner that is a massive , mistake and one that I couldn’t see for many years.
Let’s talk about the work you do. What do you specialize in and why should someone work with you over the competition?
So im an SEO guy, which stands for search engine optimisation. In laymens terms I get websites to rank on Google for keywords that people might be searching for when looking for products or services.
Its not as easy as it sounds, there really is a lot to SEO and takes a long time to try and come close to figuring out what you need to do to be able to manipulate google to some degree.
I’ve made more mistakes than most in this game, but I do a lot of testing and made those mistakes which all formed part of my apprenticeship but after 20 years in the industry and having went from freelancer to building up my own agency. Building a personal brand, and working with multiple other areas of digital marketing such as PPC, Paid Social, Social Media, creating funnels and doing all of my own email marketing, I would say I have a broad range of experience from the ground up and can use my experience to help others get to where they need to be a lot faster than it has taken me.
Networking and the contacts I have are also a major benefit to me, it isn’t always what you know, its who you know so again I know a lot of people across the world that helps me have a competitive advantage over someone less experienced.
What’s your best piece of advice for readers who desire to find success in their life?
You have to be patient, invest in yourself through doing training, spend a lot of time doing research. Get out more and network with your peers and go along to industry-specific conferences. Every day is a learning day and the day you stop learning is the day you need to consider throwing the towel in.
I have been there sitting thinking I’ll never make it, I shouldn’t be doing this, I’m not good enough and so on. But you have to believe in yourself, confidence plays a big part in anything you do and if you believe you can do it then go for it. Never be put off against going up against much bigger players.
If you have the passion and belief and inner drive then anything is achievable. I never in a million years thought I’d make decent money, I left school with nothing. But one thing I do have is that inner drive, and I’m always keen to learn and if you really enjoy what you do it makes a massive difference.
Speaking of success, what does the word mean to you?
Success is not just about finance for me, success is when you have a good work life balance, have nice money and a stress free life where you do have the time to spend with your family and take time out.
Ive made a lot of money, lost a lot of money but success is being able to enjoy my time on this planet while I’m here. I work to live, not live to work and getting yourself into that position is success. It isn’t easy and you need to work hard in the early days, but the long term goal is to be making as much money as you can whilst doing the least amount of work.
That is true success to me personally, some folk see it as a financial thing, but we dont need to be billionaires to be able to have a nice life, that’s just greedy. If you can support you and your family and life is good then its a success.
What’s next for you?
I will continue to find multiple revenue streams online, I will never slow down because I love this game. I will continue to grow my portfolio of online businesses whilst continuing to speak at industry events to try and help others achieve their goals in this industry. I do get a good sense of reward by helping others avoid the mistakes I made and I will continue to do that.
I want to focus more on my youtube channel so that I can go from strength to strength on there and across other social media platforms, whilst continuing to learn and understand how this industry evolves.
Finally, how can people connect with you if they want to learn more?
You can get me via www.craigcampbellseo.com which has links to all of my social media channels. You can get me on most social media channels by looking for ” Craig Campbell SEO” and give me a follow on any of these to keep up to date with the information I’m putting out there.
