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Yusuf Chowdhury: How Being of Service Builds Your Business

Yusuf Chowdury

In this episode, I interview Yusuf Chowdhury,
dubbed the Optimization Guy by his clients. Yusuf first stumbled into the online world by generating over 9 million Youtube video views. He also started a super successful and vibrant Meetup group that educates the local community and generated new clients and customers for his business.

Yusuf

He is a professional Digital Marketing Consultant, Business Coach and Instructor with a combined 15 years of experience in the field of marketing research. He is the CEO of Online Business Owners and YusufChowdhury.com.

It’s been so much fun seeing what you’re all about because you epitomize everything that’s good about online marketing.  I’d like to know a little bit about your journey to becoming the optimization guy.

It’s kind of a long story so I’ll do my best to keep it short.  I’ve been doing all the marketing as a hobby since 2005. My best friend and I started a different project and one of his last projects was a video blog and it took off in 2006.  So we did this as a hobby and within one year we were able to generate more than 9 million viewers and I was like, “Wow!” something so simple and basic and yet we did not invest tons of money to support something like that.  And it was a hobby for us, it was something like we wanted to give back to the community.  I just fell in love with it.  Then we started to get all these businesses asking us, “How can I get clients?  How can I be more visible on the internet?  What is blogging?  What is vlog?” and all that kind of stuff.  And since we love to help, we did help a lot of folks at no cost at the beginning.  When the demand grew, we’re kind of getting busy right now, I mean, there’s all these emails and requests and it became a business venture.  In fact when our first clients said that if he’s too busy, you could have the time, I’ll pay you.  I sort of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” then learning everything through just trial and error.

Back then MySpace was very popular.  Around 2007 or 2008 when I took this idea as a business seriously, one of my clients tell me that when he refers me to anybody else, he calls me the OG.  I’m like, “What is that, original gangster?”  He said, “No, the optimization guy.”  I said, “Oh okay, cool.”  So that’s how I got the name.

You’ve already mentioned a little bit that between 2006 when the video blog took off in 2007, 2008, you started really taking it seriously as a business, you were just giving and you were just helping and serving, tell us a little bit about your concept of giving.

I think in a way maybe it’s part of my upbringing on how I was raised, but I was in a situation, or me and my friend, we were in a situation where when we started this, we didn’t knew all the stuff out there.  We didn’t know how to run things and we wish somebody out there was helping us or willing to help us.  So we decided whatever we learned, we had to share because it’s like the same concept.  If I want a good thing for myself, I want to wish for others what I wish for myself basically.  So that’s it, whatever we learned, we always shared it, we never kept it to ourselves and I enjoy it.  Then I got into learning from all these online marketing experts and how they run their strategies, like giving some sort of value content and offers and whatnot.  I said, “Whoa, that’s an amazing concept.”  I mean you don’t have to actually use a traditional way of just selling but you actually sincerely give something of high value to build a trust and with that trust comes the proper relationship and from the relationship becomes your loyal customers.

So I took that knowledge, brought it online and it worked very well through the social media and whatnot, then I took that concept of course offline which also was kind of great.

But me personally, I truly believe in giving first and if I do that, if I focus on what can I do, how can I serve you, how can I give you something that if you’re really going to take it right now, going to have some sort of positive impact.  If I can just focus on that and give it to you sincerely, that’s it.  I believe the rest will happen.

Of course we have a plan eventually anyway that you need to generate income but I really focus on, you know what, if I’m going to give somebody something or someone a great value, I have to sincerely give it and just focus on that.

You’ve got a couple of meet-ups, groups that you run and you invited me to speak and your group loves you so much and I loved seeing that and I loved seeing all the things you had going on that were free to the public.  Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing with meet-up?

The one that I created, it’s called the San Antonio Online Marketing Group Meetup and the second one is the WordPress.  Everything on the internet as you know works very well in terms of giving value and whatnot.  I thought we should take that and put it on the offline site.  And when I created this group, believe it or not, my intention was to bring all like-minded folks in the internet marketing, the digital marketing and SEO to get together, learn from each other, that was the objective, but that didn’t happen.  So when I started this first time and I remember the first person that came to my meet up was one person and I have to stay with that person for like two hours because I didn’t want to lose it.  That was only once a month.  Then second month, few people came and people started asking me, “I can attend certain days or certain weekends, can you do it again?  Can you do it twice a month?”  And from there it just grew.  And what I basically challenge myself, especially speaking in front of the audience, I mean like anybody else if you put them on the spot in front of a thousand people, we have that fear factor, right?

I want to get rid of that, so what did I do?  I joined Toast Master which was actually amazing and I actually recommend any business to do that and on the first day, I actually overcome that challenge.  All I had to do was just overcome that fear and just do it and I decided, when I do this meet-up, I need to make sure that I’m going to be consistent and at the same time I’m going to do more so I can get more experience.  Right now it’s almost two years, we have more than 1300 members and all the sessions, the meet up that I do, I do it in freestyle.  What I mean by that, I don’t spend 3, 4 days preparing content, maybe 10, 20 minutes before the event, I just put something together through PowerPoint and just go out there and focus on the audience like what do they need and I’ll do my best, I just give it.

To anyone out there who wants to create your own platform, wants to really get into the heart and the mind of your perfect prospect, who you can help, Meetup is such a great option.

Absolutely! It’s amazing because by doing this you can see half of the people show up but the other half all new every time.  And they always get this, it’s like basically paying it forward.  If you’re blessed with your business and I totally believe that you have to go out and give something, and these platforms are amazing, I mean who thought about this?  Did you know because of setting up all these workshops, I get invited to give lectures at Our Lady of the Lake University or the community college or the Incarnate Word just because of doing this?  Just like you said, I mean if anybody wants to start something creative, some type of an effective buzz locally, I believe it’s the best way, make your own, you be the boss, you are in charge and just taking action and things are going to build up.

The other factor is that I was telling myself all the time, should I focus on the materials, should I focus on offers in myself or should I just focus on what the audience need?  So the more you think about the audience and what they need — and one of my techniques is this, when I realize this probably right now, is that I do tend to ask a lot of questions to the audience.  I don’t want to be just the first — the only person that give the information as in monologue, I want that interaction.  I need to make sure the audience, their brains are active.  So half the time believe it or not, I actually get answers from the audience and I use their own answers to kind of give it back to them in a different explanation.  The rest they can understand it.

Related Link:

30 Days of LOA – Day 12 – Harness the Power of Meetup for Your Online Business 

I want to ask you about now about your YouTube videos on your own site which is YusufChowdhury.com.  I saw that you were doing like seasons and episodes, they’re hilarious, not just value-packed but they’re hilarious.

Thank you.  There was a startup company called Breakthrough and the founder came to my class and saw what I was doing and it was funny because I was also giving a workshop on social media, online marketing and even YouTube videos.  I help others make YouTube videos, I help other businesses but never something to myself, just like the shoemaker.  So they decided to kind of help me — partially help me to see if they have the time to help me with those videos, basically putting everything that I do in the class, I just try to put it in a few minutes and you are right, that’s how I am in the class and that’s how I present the videos and nothing is scripted though.  All we do, we just come with the topic, if you put some on the whiteboard and I just start talking and that’s it.  And the reason I did that to put my kind of silly humor is because the subset of online marketing or SEO or social media, in a way sometimes actually might be considered boring to some of the local businesses, so I wanted to make it a little bit fun, great quality, some of them are okay and the reason I do that on purpose, because I want to show the small businesses that you don’t have to have an expensive equipment to do video.

What is a ‘Super Optimization Tip’ you can give my listeners? 

When it comes to the optimization, it depends in what area.  If it’s a website, do your best to understand the objective of the website, what do you want the visitor to do and what kind of call to action do you have because I do see this thing as a problem with a lot of businesses.  If you want the visitor to call you, make sure you have the phone number somewhere on the website.  If you want them to get into the list, make sure you have some sort of a call to action.  All the messages has to be directly targeted to audience and please at least do the basic on-site SEO on your website, I see some websites that don’t even do that.  If you can just do basic optimization on your website and stay consistent with weekly blog, sharing content to social, eventually within a few months you will see something has happened.

2 Comments

  1. Laura on August 27, 2015 at 1:23 pm

    Very interesting interview.
    I really like the statement: If I want a good thing for myself, I want to wish for others what I wish for myself. It matches your philosophy of living in a mental state of abundance and sharing and working accordingly. Thank you Maritza.

  2. Dean Patino on August 28, 2015 at 12:16 pm

    Outstanding! Terrific start to finish and really great to see the super optimization tip. Even though it seems straight forward to know, it’s so easy to over look. Great to see an expert confirm how valuable that is to do. Thank you Maritza and Yusuf!

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