My Story

Hey! Welcome to my blog!

I’m Shreyas Umesh, Civil Engineer by Education, Performance Marketer by Profession, and a Blogger by Passion.

I have 9+ years of experience in Blogging and 4+ years of Corporate Experience.

At present, I head Performance Marketing for a StartUp ‘PixelTrack Digital’ in Bangalore founded by Deepak Kanakaraju A.K.A DigitalDeepak.

Baller moment – I have not just worked for various clients like Nikon, YourStory, Scripbox, etc. but have also spent more than 5 CR in paid ads (Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads) for all the clients put together.

That’s about it for a short introduction.

If you’re keen to know more about me and my Digital Marketing journey, I would suggest you read this page till the very end.

Phase 1

It all started back in the year 2013 when I was 17 years old and was studying in my 12th.

My friends and I had a thing of going to gaming arenas after college hours and sometimes during college hours too. All of us loved or still love bunking classes, don’t we?

It cost us ₹80 per person for an hour to play one game and we used to always choose FIFA or WWE on PlayStation.

I was literally running out of cash that I had saved using my pocket money.

But strangely one of my friends (Mr. X) didn’t find it difficult to spend on these gaming sessions.

Nope! He wasn’t a spoiled rich kid. So we wondered, how his pockets were always full.

And where did that money come from?

One day, my friends and I asked him about it.

But he was secretive and didn’t spill the secret sauce.

But… I was wrong. He finally did reveal his unknown story to one of my best friends (Mr. Y).

He was secretly BLOGGING.

BLOGGING? I was like what does that even mean?

Back then I had no clue of what blogging meant and how one could earn from it.

My best friend (Mr. Y) collected all the possible information about this business model from Mr. X and then shared all about it with me.

Afterwhich, every evening we got on a call, discussed, and started doing our research.

We also managed to find the website that Mr. X had built.

It was a blog on web hosting reviews.

Mr. Y and I spoke for hours on-call every single day from then and came to a mutual decision that the easiest way to make money is by replicating the business model Mr. X used.

My friend and I then made a clone of Mr. X’s website.

Did some basic research on web hosting service providers, pulled off a few sentences which didn’t make much sense, copied content from all over the internet, and pasted it on our blog.

6 Months Later…

We had made zero money.

By then my other friends also came to know about this business model, they wanted to blog too.

This was our first chance to make our first dollar ($) online.

We went to a cyber cafe, browsed our website in incognito, kept my friend’s debit card ready, and finally clicked on our affiliate link and ended up purchasing a web hosting worth ₹1600.

Voila!

In the next 4 hours, we went to our affiliate dashboard and we had earned $105 in affiliate commission.

The dollar equivalent of Indian Rupees was around ₹63 back then which means we earned ₹6000 in affiliate commission after the deduction of PayPal’s transaction fees.

That just blew our minds!

Till then we didn’t even know and believe, that we could make legit money online, most importantly by being ethical.

What next?

Either we had to spend all our time and efforts doing more research and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and rank on Google to get some organic conversions for our affiliate programs or we had to focus on referring people.

We took 2 days of time and gave it a thought and finally decided that we would do both, SEO for long-term benefits and referral for short time benefits so that we could have more PlayStation games regularly.

After 3-4 months, one day when I was casually playing games on my home computer, I got a call.

Brrring….. Brrring…..

It was Mr. Y on the other side.

His joy had no bounds. I straight away asked him if we ranked for any keyword on the 1st page of Google.

And the answer was “Hell Yes!”

We were so excited and were on cloud nine the entire day.

We kept on checking the results from different devices, different browsers and asked our friends to check from different locations, we checked the results in every way possible.

2-3 weeks passed and we noticed some affiliate commissions coming in.

Good $300-$400 every month to start with.

We also kept our Facebook page updated with all the posts we were writing and managed to get a US-based client.

He was into poetry and he asked us if we could set up his blog and we did that in no time.

We earned some easy bucks there.

Another 3-4 months passed and now things seemed to change.

I was done with my 12th education and Mr. Y decided to fly to Lithuania, a country in Europe to settle there.

Just like long-distance relationships, it’s very hard to run an online business being far apart (At least during those times with low-speed internet in tier 2 cities like Mangalore).

We decided to part ways with the online business and it was a mutual decision that we took. 

I decided that I wanted to start a blog of my own because 70% of what was built to date was built by Mr. Y.

I was just helping him out in little yet not so little ways.

So, I let go of the existing blog to Mr. Y completely.

I immediately started a blog called “Imperial Host Blogger” in the same niche which was web hosting reviews.

Out of excitement I also ended up owning a Travel blog in which I wrote about different places one could visit in Mangalore, had no intention to make money with the travel, it was only because I roamed around Mangalore all the time with my friends back then.

I made a ton of mistakes with the new blog mostly because I was in the mindset of making money.

My summer vacation was over.

I then chose to become a Civil Engineer because my dad was into the real estate business (Builder) after he got retired.

I got busy, I hardly spent 3 hours a week learning different things in blogging.

By the end of my first year of Engineering, my pockets were empty and had no cash to reinvest in my blogs, especially to renew the hosting which cost me close to ₹6000 and the domains I owned which came down to ₹1800.

My dreams were shot and vanished in no time.

But I decided to take my time. I went back to find the answer to what really went wrong along my way.

And then I realized my hosting blog was penalized by Google because I had plagiarized content.

Such a shame!

I spent uncountable hours making sure I realized what I could have done better and how.

MINDSET OF MAKING MONEY

This is where everything went wrong. 

Lesson learnt: People will not consume your content if you don’t provide them value in the first place.

These user signals are very important for you to rank in search engines like Google.

Secondly, they won’t transact with you if they’re not convinced enough.

I ended up making a list of all the mistakes I had made.

Would a fresh start help? YES! Absolutely it would.

And that’s why I went back and bought a new domain name “WhyHostWithMe”.

But this time it was with a genuine intention to only help people decide better.

In the coming year, I did extensive research on all the hosting companies, and bought several virtual monitors to track server uptime.

I also started writing content without placing an affiliate link.

Worked on SEO and implemented it, got some traffic, started ranking on page 2 and above in no time.

I was extremely happy about the results.

But as everybody knows, the 2nd page and later hardly get any traffic.

There is a meme that says, “One can hide a dead body on page 2 of Google and no one will ever know”.

I didn’t worry too much about it. I went on creating more content whenever I got time to do so.

I also made some affiliate commissions by manually referring people on Facebook and other social media platforms.

I reinvested in my blog with the affiliate commissions as well as my pocket money.

This is pretty much everything that happened in Phase 1 of my Blogging/Digital Marketing journey.

Phase 2

Coming to phase 2 of my blogging journey, I was casually browsing on Facebook, hunting for more content on Blogging and Digital Marketing and I came across an advertisement which said “25 Free Digital Marketing videos” and in no time I checked the Facebook page of the person who was running this ad. He had a good number of likes and reviews on his page.

I went ahead and clicked on the ad. It took me to a landing page which said, ‘25 Free Digital Marketing videos, one video every day directly to your inbox’.

I was amazed looking at that and in no time I had signed up for it. The first video popped in my google mail immediately. I was awestruck to what just happened as I found the automation very interesting.

I absolutely loved watching all the videos. I also got access to his learning management system (LMS).

On a daily basis, I started receiving emails from Deepak. Every single day he added value to my life for FREE.

After a month, I smelled promotional emails, but by then I didn’t mind because he had already provided so much value that I was looking forward to these emails.

‘SEO Mastery’ course it said. I already knew the quality of the videos he had created for the free course.

I quickly grabbed my phone and checked my bank account balance. I looked at the mail which said ₹999 (Early bird offer) and in no time I made the payment.

I went on to buy his other courses with time. 

But one course changed my future.

It was the “100 Day Blogging Course” 

Deepak promised to make 100 videos for the next 100 days in which he would set up a new blog and would scale it up.

It was a no-brainer for me. I bought it immediately for ₹1999.

And from then, every single day I would wait for his videos.

I watched them without missing out on even a single day and instantly implemented the learnings on my blog.

30 days passed and I had implemented everything Deepak taught. I soon started seeing some clicks in my search console. 

I swear that’s one of the best feelings for a blogger.

We also had a private Facebook group for the students of the 100 Day Blogging Course where I made a ton of digital marketer friends and one of them turned out to be very special in my career.

My site ranked for some low-volume keywords on the first page and surprisingly made some affiliate commission as well.

Things changed as soon as my college started. I stopped listening to his videos and only updated my website once a month along with my friend ‘Shreyas Somayaji’.

I briefed him about the business model and he helped me with the research.

Grissel Fernandes, founder of Wordanova and Hana Moosa, founder of Writinglady also helped me with my blog by writing and editing articles and I helped them set up their blogs in return.

I kept on purchasing the new courses Deepak launched from time to time.

In the meanwhile, I also developed some interest in designing websites. 

I used to sit for hours and watch videos on YouTube about WordPress web designing.

I started practising web designing in my subdomains. By the way, I had taken Computer science as my core subject in my 12th, so I was comfortable with understanding the basics of HTML and CSS codes as well.

I went on to buy more domains just for testing purposes and to practice web designing.

And in a while, I ended up getting some freelance clients for web designing.

After 4 years, my education was coming to an end.

By the time it was over, I had decided that I wanted to become a Digital Marketer and not a Civil Engineer.

I had gotten placed in a company in Bangalore but I didn’t take it forward.

I knew I wanted to be a Digital Marketer but I had no idea how I could get a job in Digital Marketing.

I felt discomfort with my decision. That feeling wasn’t good.

But I had a way through…

One of the best friends I made during my 100 Day blogging course was Harliien Man, Founder of Unbounce Careers.

She is a beautiful human being and had around 10+ years of experience in Human Resource.

And luckily she had a tie-up with Deepak and PixelTrack Digital and had started placing their students.

My life took a new turn when I grabbed my phone and gave a ring to Harliien Man.

She consulted me for 30 mins straight and told me about the ground reality of the Digital Marketing job industry.

She asked me to come to Bangalore immediately and intern at her company and PixelTrack as both of them worked closely.

I told my parents about my decision and they respected it.

I packed my bags and left for Bangalore in a week or so.

Why would anybody miss a chance of working with DigitalDeepak & his team?

100’s of students out there are waiting for this opportunity and I was so lucky to get that opportunity. All thanks to Harliien Man (Sister for life).

I helped them with WordPress blogs, building landing pages, keyword research, etc.

1.5 months down the line, Deepak and Sanjay (ex. Co-founder of PixelTrack) had already seen my skills and were happy to offer me a full-time job as a “Digital Marketing Executive” without an interview.

Like a Boss 😎

Again this would have never happened without the help of Harliien Man (Do follow her on LinkedIn, she is a full-time Digital Marketing Career Coach).

After that, I started working super hard, I started taking initiative, and responsibilities and became accountable for a lot of client work.

Day by day, things got better, I built landing pages for Deepak’s courses which started getting 30%+ conversion rates.

I learnt PPC and automation with Deepak’s guidance.

Practised it day and night. I made sure that I wouldn’t waste time once I came back home. 

One day our Key accounts manager who handled PixelTrack clients had to resign due to health issues. It was really unfortunate and sad and the most difficult part was that as much as we missed her presence in the Company and wished for her speedy recovery, the work still needed to be done. We were still answerable and responsible to give the best results to our clients.

In such times, I was given the responsibility of getting things done and going. Ever since then, I have just been learning, implementing, and managing more and more things at PixelTrack, with each passing day.

I worked for clients like Mercedes Benz, Nikon, YourStory, Scripbox, Vakil Housing, Getting Things Done, etc.

Spent more than 4 CR in paid ads (until 2020 April). Attended client meetings, did product launches, and whatnot.

Phase 3

The day had come when the co-founders decided to part ways and start their own companies.

Sanjay headed on to create Tractionn Edtech and Deepak went on to create LearnToday while keeping PixelTrack Digital in the dark.

Both companies focused on creating live cohort-based training programs.

LearnToday went on to capture a bigger market by targeting people who wanted to get into Digital Marketing, on the other hand, Tractionn Edtech focused on a smaller market that wanted to learn SEO and Content Marketing.

The potential for both companies was almost equal.

While this transition happened, Deepak politely asked me to support Sanjay with the new company because I was the only employee who had worked with Sanjay closely while in PixelTrack.

I respectfully agreed and became the Digital Marketing Manager of Tractionn Edtech.

I helped Sanjay build systems to form a rock-solid foundation and then scaled the revenue from 0 to 3 CR in a matter of 2.5 years with performance marketing (paid ads mostly) and marketing automation.

We built kick-ass landing pages, Facebook ads funnel, WhatsApp marketing flows, an affiliate system, automated marketing reports, a ton of automation and 3 mind-blowing live training programs on SEO, Content Marketing and Marketing Automation.

The best part was I got to train more than 1500 learners as a co-instructor across 15 different cohort batches.

With that being said, I thought it was time for me to move on and explore Digital Marketing for more industries back again, mostly because I had spent a good 2.5 years working in EdTech Industry (Tractionn Edtech) and it had become monotonous.

Phase 4

I resigned from Tractionn Edtech on 15th September 22 and decided to restart PixelTrack Digital Agency with Deepak.

The urge to put back all the learnings from the past 4 years into different industries in order to help businesses was high AF.

I also wanted to try out performance marketing for different businesses like eCommerce and SAAS.

I will be joining PixelTrack back again on 3rd October 22.

The story here will be updated every 6 months…

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Final words

It has been a beautiful journey so far and I have learned a ton of things.

I always wish and hope that there’s more to come and to keep learning from my experiences.

I’m not sure if this story has inspired you but I really hope that it did and as in the movie ‘Finding Dory’, Dory says ‘Just Keep Swimming’, let’s all of us keep in mind to just keep learning.

Having a mentor in life is super important if you wish to achieve something really big.

Through my blog, I hope to be your Digital Marketing friend and mentor to help you with your journey.

If you liked my story do share it with your friends (especially the ones in the Digital Marketing field).

My motto with this blog is to help budding digital marketers make their careers in the Digital Marketing field by learning not-so-common things.

If you’re someone who wants to start a career in Digital Marketing or Upskill and get promoted then subscribe to my newsletter.

I only send good stuff once in a while so do not worry about your privacy.

Things you can expect from the newsletter.

1. Paid ads strategies, how-to guides, case studies
2. SEO action plans for algorithm updates, new link-building techniques and strategies
3. Some really cool automation that can oil your business systems
4. Walk-through of amazing tools that can ease your Digital Marketing activities
5. A lot of Freebies

Cheers,
Shreyas Umesh