About Jay
Born and raised in the food heaven of Malaysia, Penang. Was taught to be an engineer but found his passion in digital marketing.
Jay's Story
Back in 2017, While still working as an engineer in Singapore, I knew I don’t want to be in this role for life. I’m not passionate about creating thumbnail size microchips. Working for 7 years as an engineer, I found neither excitement nor job satisfaction from my role.
I’m still puzzled about what I should do in the next few years.
The turning point comes on a great day in April 2017. An email notifying us that we got our Australia Permanent Visa for the next 5 years.
I knew this was my chance to ditch my engineer career and go for something interesting. But what is it?
What Should I do?
In the past, I’ve wanted to work on something related to the internet. From currency trading to selling kitchen appliances on Amazon, none of them took off.
Despite the failure, I still have faith my next career will be related to the digital world. Lucky enough, I’ve stumbled upon digital marketing primarily focus on search engine optimization, AKA building a website, and rank it organically.
This will be a very interesting career. In the day, I can help my clients to achieve their KPI, results that they want. At night, I can build my own website as a side hustle to earn some extra cash.
Throughout my 7 years as an engineer, I never once use my skills outside of work. This might be it.
Learning on the side
While still having a full-time job as an engineer, I kept myself busy at night to learn all the ins and outs of SEO. I joined at least 4 different SEO courses, spending thousands of dollars on it, most of my nights in 2017 in trying to sharpen my skills and understand the right way of doing it.
It wasn’t smooth sailing in the beginning. My very first SEO course basically is more about content creation. If you are not getting traffic, it means that you haven’t created enough content to get it rank. So keep creating more content.
I immersed myself in creating great content for the first 9 months. There are times where I’m doubting myself if this even works. No one is reading my content nor I was ranking on the first page. Not getting decent traffic for 9 months is so demoralizing.
That prompted me to join the second, third and fourth SEO courses to really see how people excel in growing organic traffic on their website.
The Excitements
Joining the course helped to broaden my knowledge and kickstart the organic traffic on my website. I tried many tricks and tips shared in the course and from others in the Facebook group.
At the beginning of 2018, organic traffic started to grow and my website started ranking in Google. The increase in organic traffic makes me feel super excited and proud that I’m capable of having my website appear and found on the web.
This instant upward growth on the graph is what makes me work on my website and see it growing every single day
Career Change Become Reality
The excitement leads to me confirming the career that I wanted to enter for the next few years. Since I have to be in Australia before 2020, I think it is worth making a career change while moving to a new country.
In addition, I think it will be crucial to work in an agency to gain professional experience in digital marketing.
To be frank, everyone told me that I stand no chance of getting an interview offsite let alone landing a job. After being turned down once, I reapplied for the same role and got accepted on the second round!
Getting my hands dirty on building a website from scratch and the self-learning really accelerate and increase my chance of landing a job.
No Regrets!
Fast forward to 2021, I’m still in the field of digital marketing, managing some of the well-known brands in the country, and continue to build and grow my website.
I’ve turned a passion into a career and able to excel in this field. By starting this blog, I wanted to share my experience on
- How to make a career change
- Encourage others to start a side hustle.
- To share my tips SEO.
Head to the resources section to learn more!
Speaks soon!