Say hi to Marina Vassilyovska – a full-stack marketer with almost 10 years of digital experience. After moving around within the digital marketing field and covering different roles that included SEO, SMM, affiliate and content marketing, she’s currently a part of the creative agency Smarkethink. She’s a huge fan of WordPress and firmly believes that it’s the best project in the history of internet.
How did she find WordPress, what’s the best advice she ever got and does she stay well hydrated? Read this short interview to find out!
Hi Marina, please introduce yourself!
My name is Marina Vassilyovska and I’m from originally Sofia, Bulgaria but considering the past decade of my life, you may say that I’m a digital citizen. 🙂What’s your specialty?
I’m a digital marketer and WordPress plays a big role in my day-to-day work, since most of our customers build their websites on WordPress. Being a marketer requires that you combine two things that you’d never thought go along – creativity and statistics. I’m a big fan of both things – it’s amazing to have the creative freedom, but in order to get the best of it, you HAVE to adapt it to the data.How many languages do you speak?
I speak English and Italian (not so well anymore) and obviously Bulgarian (sometimes not so well either).What was your first encounter with WordPress?
That’s a funny story actually. Back in 2007, a close friend of mine was teaching me how to use Joomla and create a website for myself in order to sell the crafts I was doing at the time. A couple of months later, when the website was ready, he came to me – very excited – and told me “Hey listen, I just found this awesome new platform, it’s call WordPress and it’s really simple to use and cool. You wanna try it?”. My initial reaction was: “Are you crazy?! I just learned how to use this one, I am NOT switching” so he actually had to bribe me in order to even show me the new thing. It then took me another two years before I finally started to use it, because I was so in love with Joomla. Since then though, WordPress has been always my CMS of choice and I suspect it will always be.What is the best WordPress advice you have ever received?
Don’t go crazy with the plugins. And I get it – users see what amazing things you can achieve through plugins and just keep piling them up – totally understandable. What many people don’t realize is that overuse of plugins will eventually start slowing down the website and also might creates bigger risk of plugin conflict or things not working out properly. I do have my “toolbox” of plugins which I use a lot, but I tend to try and keep the number low.What is your motivation to speak at WordCamp Sofia 2017?
Honestly, it sounds corny, but I just feel I have enough knowledge now to give back to the community, since many years I have only received from it. I’d love to help out people who struggle with issues related to WordPress and marketing, so if you think I can help you out, find me online and we can talk.How did you you choose the topic of your talk?
I’m a huge fan of the inbound marketing methodology and after a heated debate with a fellow marketer, I realized there are still many people who aren’t entirely familiar with its real power. So I was thinking of ways to promote this type of marketing and just around that time, the call for speakers for Sofia WordCamp came out. I’ve never participated in conferences as speaker, but I thought to myself that this can be a pretty good place to start.How much water do you drink a day?
I drink so much water, it’s almost ridiculous. So to balance out, I drink a lot of coffee too.
During her talk on the topic of Inbound Marketing, Marina will share with us main principles and examples of their implementation, as well as tools (including WP-related) that accompany this marketing approach.
Get you WordCamp Sofia 2017 ticket today so you can hear what Marina has to say!
Emanuel Blagonic has more than 13 years of experience and more than 500 different projects with worldwide clients on his back. From designing websites to designing touch–screen applications, he worked with small and big clients, startups and global projects. Although primarily a designer, he’s been in love with WordPress for the past 10 years, being one of the biggest promoters in Croatia – writing articles about WordPress that are not only promoting WordPress but open source as well. He helped organize the first WordCamp Croatia and organizes WordPress Meetup Zagreb with his brother Lucijan.
