Switching Gears: Implementing AI for My Agency’s Marketing After a Decade

Hi there,

I’ve been running a software development and design agency for the last 10 years, mainly focusing on building custom solutions for businesses and SaaS. For the last 2 years, I’ve consistently recommended that clients use AI technologies, especially for social media and content creation to generate traffic. Funny enough, I wasn’t practicing what I preached. Most of my client projects came from platforms like Upwork and word-of-mouth referrals from clients or people from networking events.

Background

I started my journey in 2014, switching from an employee to a freelancer. Within the first 10 months, my initial projects grew beyond what I could handle alone, prompting me to hire additional developers. This shift turned my role from a full-stack developer to a team lead and developer. Over the years, my focus has been a blend of tech and product. About five years ago, I realized the importance of design, leading me to adding designers to the agency to provide full-cycle service development—from product ideation and design to development, testing, launch, and support.

I still continue to set up dedicated teams for some clients, maintaining a strong technical role as a tech lead, solution architect, and head product designer. To enhance my skills, I even completed UI/UX design courses to offer better product solutions. Despite these changes, building products has always been the easy part. The challenge was ensuring these client products didn’t end up in the graveyard due to poor product-market fit, often caused by inadequate marketing and sales strategies but more often just absence of them. (we are talking about startup and first time founders here 🙂 )

My Journey and Observations

• Advising Clients: I often found myself advising clients on increasing traffic for their SaaS products and crafting strategic marketing plans.
• Learning: I’ve gained most of my knowledge from consuming internet materials, courses, and blog posts and learning from successful client project launches.
• Realization: Despite giving this advice, I wasn’t applying these strategies to my own business, leading to low visits to my agency’s website.

Initial Solution: Hiring a Marketer

• Hiring: I brought in a marketer with a solid background in content creating and interview video editing from an educational organization.
• Goal: The aim was to increase website visits through a comprehensive marketing strategy.
• Outcome: Although the content produced was high-quality and useful for pitching services, it didn’t lead to significant traffic increases.
• Issue: The marketer focused more on content creation rather than distribution channels, which limited effectiveness.

Shift to AI-Driven Strategy

• Experiment: I decided to try using AI for content creation and distribution, which aligns with my agency’s specialization in design-driven development and AI integrations.
• Implementation plan: I will be generating all content with minimal edits using AI and implementing a strategic backlinking approach.

Backlinking Strategy

• Initial Plan: I initially thought of hiring a specialist for backlinks.
• Realization: The costs and profiles of freelancers didn’t seem promising.
• Solution: I found AI-driven services for backlinks, which seem more efficient and cost-effective.
• Plan: My plan is to use these tools for programmatic SEO-driven AI-generated articles and third-party backlinking services over the next two to three months.

Current Approach

• Management: This approach can be managed and executed by 1 person and monitored weekly, reducing human error and optimizing efficiency. I will start it myself and then replace myself with an editor with managing skills.
• Reflection: It’s a bit ironic and funny that it took me 10 years to start implementing these strategies in my own agency business, but I now feel more confident with AI and automation in place.

Why Increase Website Visitors?

You might ask, why do I want to increase the number of visitors to the site, and how can I ensure these visitors will be qualified?

1. Hands-On Experience: To gain hands-on experience and perform this exercise effectively.
2. Introduce Packaged Services: I want to introduce a set of low-cost packaged services tailored for non-technical people who want to build things for themselves - the DIY kits for non-technical folks. These services will provide a foundational template for them to build upon on top of existing established solutions such as Wix, Square

Why am I Posting and Sharing Here?

You might also wonder, why am I posting it here and sharing this? Well, I'm doing this more for myself. Most of my career, the things I’ve done have been behind the curtains. With this small project, I want to make it public to see the reaction of the community. Perhaps there will be good and smart suggestions offered, and maybe some insights or highlights of tools I wasn’t aware of or didn’t consider.

I’ll keep sharing updates on this journey of website promotion, marketing, and SEO. My current goal is to reach 2,000 visits per month, which is a modest start.

Looking forward to any thoughts or advice from this community!

Disclaimer: This content was not generated by AI, but it was edited by it 😛