Shulke

Interview with Anton Shulke Video Content Lead at SEMrush

How did you get in to the digital world? 

Haha, long story, let’s make it short. I had a lounge bar in Valencia, SpainBut the 2008 crisis killed it, well I survive for a couple of years but had to close it down. When I was “reflexing” in Valencia, some friend of mine asked me to be a project manager (IT project in Ukraine to make software for Russia).

I am a mathematician by education and used to be a programmer, well a long time ago, but I thought that would be enough to understand the thing.I came to Kiev and was about to get into the project, as Revolution happened in Ukraine and relations with Russia soured.

No more RU & UA projects. I still had to eat, so I started my English teaching career:) At some point, I had a student who was already involved in Digital Marketing for some years in Ukraine and wanted to extend it to the Western (English Speaking) world. His English wasn’t bad, but a bit rusty. During the lessons, it became obvious that it would be easy for me to get the gist of marketing than my student good enough English. I was offered a webinar host job. I had no idea what I was about to get into:)

How many webinars have you run so far? 

Not really sure, I started as a host for WebPromo Expert, and have hosted about 100+ there. In SEMrush, I do not host them myself, organizing role. Probably 200+ here, so must be 300+, close to 400 I guess.

What tips and trick you could give away to those just starting up with the webinars?

What makes webinar unforgettable? Webinars are easy, cheap to do, That’s why there are so many companies do them. Especially small companies with very small budgets. But space is saturated, it is similar to email marketing.

Really unforgettable… extremely difficult, like magic, something should happen, something you probably don’t expect. In my 300+ happened only once, when Google’s Andrey Lipattcev answering Ammon Johns question about ranking factors, confirmed (for the first time) that links, content and RankBrain are 3 ranking factors. Barry Swartz was watching the webinar and published it immediately. We had 30,000 views in a couple of days:)

Anton Schulke with Aria and Fernando
Anton, Aria & Fernando at Semrush Meetup in Tel Aviv

Beside Semrush do you watch any other webinars?  

I used to watch David’s Bain Digital Radio things, he doesn’t do them regularly, he is SEMrush podcast host right now:) 
Patrick Reinhart’s 30/30 (conductor) is good. Well, many others.

The most popular webinars you ever run? (number of sign ups? ) 

We had Larry Kim and Will Critchlow and there were 1031 live viewers, that’s what count live audience, not registrations:) And we are talking about a single webinar, not an online conference.

SEO and Digital predictions for 2019?

I am not an SEO, but I think SEO is Dead! Haha, joke. Technical SEO will die when Searching Engines “grow up” and won’t be equal 4-5 years but 45 years old, it won’t happen in 2019.

Shlomi Meshulam 
with Craig Campbell and Anton Shulke at BE ALL.
Shlomi Meshulam
with Craig Campbell and Anton Shulke at BE ALL.

People to follow?

Being not an SEO I still do need to know what is happening:  Haynes, Aleyda Solis, Barry Schwartz, Barry Adams are my prime source of information. But I would recommend keeping your eye on Ross Tavendale, David Iwanow, Kevin Indig, Craig Campbell and Jake Bohall, well Jason Barnard as well with his new podcast. Talking about PPC, Joel Bondorowsky, Brad Geddes, Joe Martinez, Samantha Noble, and Kirk Williams. Social Media: Rebekah Radice, Ai Addyson-Zhang, Akvile DeFazio, Mike Sadowski.

Your biggest fail? 

I didn’t buy that lottery ticket, you know that one with 1M dollar prize:) On a serious note, I failed Rand Fishkin twice, I called him for a live webinar and had to cancel it because of the third party, I can’t go into details… And yes I did have Rand numerous times as well:)

Visit Anton Shulke’s blog!

Anton Shulke

Head of Influencer Marketing (SEO) at SEMrush

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