“How I Built an SEO Business Powered by Digital Nomads” is a conversation between the Founders Coffee Club and Galileo Tech Media CEO Joseph McElroy.
Following a personal tragedy, McElroy realized that he no longer wanted to work from an office, supporting a large staff. Instead, he founded Galileo Tech Media, a network of marketing professionals that helps companies like Marriott International and Better Homes and Gardens to improve their SEO, generate quality content, and meet advertising and marketing goals.
The strength of McElroy’s approach, he says in this podcast, is in his ability to identify key needs for companies and find ways to meet those needs in an efficient, scalable way. Many companies are eager to improve their SEO and content marketing, but they face challenges when they try to scale up that work. For instance, before COVID hit, Galileo was providing 4,000 pieces of content per month for one of their largest clients. That scale of content production requires the management of a large network of freelancers, and Galileo Tech Media provides that network.
Content Marketing from Day One
McElroy notes that companies should be producing quality content from day one of being open for business. Make a schedule for creating and sharing content that’s relevant to your industry, then continue to produce that content in a consistent and interesting way. If you release a podcast or a webinar, you can then find ways to repurpose that content in other formats.
Once you’ve made a start on producing content for your business, McElroy recommends paying close attention to the metadata that Google and other search engines require. Use free tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush and Yoast to guide your thinking around SEO and content marketing.
Install Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager immediately, and be prepared to add customer relationship management (CRM) and other tools to your marketing stack as you grow your business.
Building Your Network
McElroy attributes his success in the largest part to his ability to build a network. When he was first starting out, he worked hard to identify “digital nomads”: people who wanted a flexible lifestyle and flexible schedules to allow themselves the time and space to travel and experience life in ways that a nine-to-five office schedule wouldn’t allow.
One major way that McElroy identified these “digital nomads” was by identifying companies in a particular vertical that had recently been sold into other companies. After the sale, many employees moved on or were laid off, and McElroy was able to identify those workers via LinkedIn and reach out to them to share his vision for Galileo Tech Media. Once he was hooked into this network, his new contacts could help build his network outward, assisting him to strategically identify workers who no longer wanted the big agency career or had a different vision for their lives.
Asked how he managed to land some of his larger clients, McElroy reemphasized the importance of networks and referrals. By starting at a small scale and providing freelancers to a single creative director at a larger company, Galileo Tech Media was able to show its value and then offer the client company the ability to scale up that work.
But networks are only half the story: another of his “whale” clients, Better Homes and Gardens, got to Galileo Tech Media via SEO and content marketing, reaching out after they read a blog post.
At the close of the podcast, McElroy shared his website, GalileoTechMedia.com, and referred listeners to his own podcast, Wise Content Creates Wealth.
