Andrew:
Personal Backstory: I’m sure your audience (and ours) would like to know about the real Victoria Kurichenko. Tell us a little about your backstory. How did you grow up? What did you want to be when you were a kid?

Victoria:
I grew up in the central part of Ukraine, in the city of Kryvyi Rih. After graduating from high school, I moved to Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine, to continue my education at a university.

I can’t recall anything specific about my childhood, and I didn’t dream of becoming anyone in particular. At that time, I was unsure of what I wanted from life or how I envisioned my future. This understanding came much later in life.

When I was a sophomore student, I started traveling around Europe, getting to know different cultures and cities. Prior to settling in Canada, I had explored around 20 European countries and lived temporarily in Budapest, Hungary, and Batumi, Georgia.

In fact, I bought my first apartment on the Georgian coast when I was just 27 years old—all thanks to my entrepreneurial mindset and a desire to get more out of my life.

Andrew:
I first came across your work on Medium. I think your articles are great. I can see why you have a large following of over 19k followers. I read your bio there too.

It seems you’ve tried many things online:

  • Your website (Self Made Millennials)
  • Medium
  • LinkedIn
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Selling digital books/products (Gumroad)
  • Email Marketing
  • SEO Consulting

I’d love to hear a few quick thoughts on each of these.

Victoria:
When I quit my full-time job in June 2021, I wanted to be my own boss and never work and live according to someone else’s rules. However, I didn’t really know how to achieve it. Although I had experience working as an employee, managing an online business required different skills, which I didn’t have back then.

Medium was the first platform I joined to improve my writing skills and make some extra cash. Little did I know that Medium was way more than just a writing platform. It’s a powerful tool for reaching thousands of people worldwide with your stories, even if you’ve just started.

This is exactly what happened to my very first Medium story, “How I Improved Google Ads’ Keyword Quality Score From 3 to 7.” It was published at BetterMarketing and read by thousands of like-minded experts worldwide.

In fact, this story still attracts the eyeballs — 3 years later!

Even though Medium has changed a lot since 2020, I still see it as a go-to platform to improve writing skills, get to know your audience, learn persuasive writing, understand your niche, validate some business ideas, and more.

Thanks to Medium, I validated my ebook topic: “How to write blog posts that hit the Google front page.” I’ve sold over 320 copies by now passively, mainly via Medium and my website.

I launched my website, selfmademillennials.com, in August 2021 as an SEO experiment and my digital playground. Since then, it has been my case study, proof of my SEO skills and expertise, a traffic generation source, and an additional income source.

This Beehiiv review has made me over $4,000 in affiliate income!

Email marketing, consulting, and my current active engagement on Linkedin are all part of my experiments to find low-effort strategies with high-impact outcomes.

Note: We also love and use Beehiiv. You might also be interested in our Beehiiv review.

After all, my goal has never been to work more to earn more. Since when I switched to entrepreneurship, my personal goal has been to build a lifestyle business, which would enable me to live my dream life regardless of location. I believe I’m succeeding. That’s the most important to me.

Andrew:
Which things on the list have brought you the most success?

Victoria:
My client business, Medium, and my website let me quit my full-time job, become my own boss, and live my life according to my own rules.

Andrew:
Which ones do you plan to do more of in the future and why?

Victoria:
In early 2024, I shifted my focus to maximizing returns on my efforts. This involves prioritizing high-value tasks and cutting back on those that consume a lot of time without generating significant results.

This means I’m scaling up my client work. I get SEO-related inquiries from individual website owners, startups, and established companies. However, I only collaborate with companies that are open to improvements and have a laser focus on quality of work.

I’ve established long-term relationships with several clients and anticipate further growth in this area.

Andrew:
Based on a few Google searches, it seems everything you’ve done online is in written form. Have you ever considered video or audio (podcasts)? I’m curious why or why not.

Victoria:
I’m a firm believer that you only put effort into growing your own business as long as you feel excited about it. It should spark joy, otherwise the motivation will quickly fade away.

Written content is my favorite content format. Therefore, whenever I want to learn something new, I turn to books and blogs.

Consequently, when I decided to build my personal brand, I opted for platforms like Medium, and Linkedin, as they allowed me to share my writing with a global audience.

Tim Soulo, Ahrefs’ CMO, wrote in his article “Don’t Start a Podcast”:

“Running a podcast is A LOT of work. I can’t imagine doing Ahrefs Podcast alone. Yes, you can cut corners here and there. But you risk compromising the quality. And a low-quality show will make all your promotional efforts a lot less effective.”

As an entrepreneur and a content creator, I know pretty well what it takes to launch and grow a new product or build a personal brand from scratch.

Let’s take my Medium account as an example. I took me 4 years of consistent weekly writing to establish presence on Medium, build an audience of around to 20,000 followers and make decent income from the platform.

It takes a lot of work!

I prefer investing my valuable time and energy into marketing channels that work for me, which I know how to leverage well and serve my audience.

Andrew:
What is the biggest lesson(s) you’ve learned so far with online marketing?

Victoria:
Here’s a lesson I wish I had learned earlier: being a T-shaped marketing specialist is more rewarding than being a generalist.

When I started as a junior marketer in 2015, I wore many hats, including SEO, social media marketing, online reputation management, paid ads, and even website creation. This was an invaluable experience that, in many ways, shaped my future career. I learned which areas of marketing I liked working with and could deliver top-notch results. However, I’ve also learned that I won’t be able to become an expert in any field if I continue being an all-in-one marketing specialist to cover all possible company needs.

So, I decided to focus on SEO, particularly SEO writing. This specialization became the foundation of my online business and allowed me to live by my own rules.

After writing over 500 optimized articles for clients and my website, I mastered SEO writing and now effectively meet clients’ demanding SEO goals.

Being a T-shaped expert makes you more valuable in the job market since many companies might be looking for your knowledge and skills. Besides, it can pave your way to entrepreneurship, should you wish to transform your life.

Andrew:
You’ve done a great job building up your personal brand online. What are a couple of tips you would recommend to other people starting out?

Victoria:
Everyone starts from 0, but only those who have discipline and persistence to carry on will succeed.

Even if you consistently share content but don’t see the desired results, remember that someone is watching you and might reach out at any time.

This is exactly what happened to me while building my personal brand on Medium.

Moving fast and burning out has never been my goal. Therefore I move rather slowly but consistently, while enjoying my entrepreneurial journey.

It took me 4 years to build a decent follower base, around 20,0000 followers on my Medium account, and roughly a year to grow my email list to 3,000 subscribers. Nowadays, I don’t have to do any outbound marketing campaigns to maintain my business since my personal brand and word of mouth bring in new collaborations.

Once again, I haven’t done anything outstanding to achieve this.

Success is inevitable for those who don’t have any excuses.

Andrew:
Where do you think SEO is headed in the medium term? Is it possible things like search generative experience, AI generated content, and Perplexity pretty much kill SEO?

Victoria:
In my opinion, SEO will exist as long as people use search engines to find information and marketers use them to seed content.

With the widespread introduction of AI, the way we approach SEO will drastically change. The content quality bar will likely increase since the Internet is full of garbage content, and its amount is only increasing.

SEOs are currently optimizing for SERP snippets. They’ll likely start optimizing for AI overviews in the near future.

Moreover, the value and importance of technical SEO will increase over time due to fierce competition and increased focus on user experience.

Andrew:
What major social media platforms are more important to you? Do you bother posting on social media much, or do you find it to be a waste of time?

Victoria:
I’ve tried posting on Linkedin and Twitter.

I’ve learned that the return on investment heavily depends on your effort. Unlike SEO, where a well-optimized content piece can drive traffic for years, social media works differently.

You’ll only succeed if you show up consistently and actively interact with others. This requires a lot of time and effort. Besides, users’ attention span is limited since they don’t specifically look for your content there. It’s your task to catch and keep their attention and transform it into action.

Nowadays, I focus on growing my Linkedin account to diversify my client acquisition channels.

I can reach my audience on Linkedin if I consistently post relevant content. In fact, I’ve published 22 posts in my first month on Linkedin and landed one client. If interested in more details, I shared my experience in this Medium post.

Andrew:
What has been the most surprisingly good strategy you’ve tried with online marketing?

Victoria:
One simple yet effective strategy I’ve found is replicating high-performing blog post titles.

Why is it crucial?

Because the first challenge is to grab users’ attention and make them click. Only then can they discover and potentially engage with your content.

This title has worked extremely well on Medium: I’ve Been Selling eBooks on Gumroad for 6 Months — Here’s What Works.

Views: 18.4k

Reads: 8k

Claps: 9.5k

Comments: 140

Here’s how I replicated it for one of my next posts, which has also performed quite well:

I’ve Been Selling eBooks on Gumroad for 6 Months— Here’s What Doesn’t Work

Views: 5.4k

Reads: 2k

Claps: 4.92k

Comments: 72

Keeping things simple is usually the best way to achieve success. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, identify the methods that work exceptionally well and consistently apply them.

Andrew:
Which one has been the biggest disappointment?

Victoria:
Twitter has been a disappointment for me personally. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad platform for everyone. I think Twitter is overcrowded, and building a following there requires a significant investment of time and effort.

Ultimately, I decided to focus on Linkedin instead. I’ve found that Linkedin is much more effective for me, with posts consistently reaching hundreds, if not thousands, of people. In contrast, my Twitter posts barely got noticed.

Andrew:
How much do you personally use AI?

Victoria:
I regularly use AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini while creating content to:

  • Create outlines
  • Paraphrase vague sentences
  • Write clear and concise definitions
  • Create and answer FAQs

Andrew:
Are you using AI more and more? Do you think it is overhyped? Or will it really the next big game changer?

Victoria:
The current surge in AI tools is just the beginning of a much larger trend. I believe AI will soon become an integral part of our lives regardless of whether we want this or not.

As an SEO specialist and content writer, I’m focused on learning how to use AI to my advantage.

SEO and human writing won’t disappear in the future, even if the Internet will be full of AI content. People want to hear stories and learn from people. A personal brand and thought leadership will become increasingly important because people (just like search engines) will favor familiar and reputable sources.