I Didn't Want toBe a Marketer

I did not grow up wanting to work in marketing. In fact, I spent a long time trying to move in the opposite direction.

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. My father worked in advertising and was a great salesman, but I was never attracted to the idea of making art to sell a product. I wanted art for its own sake. I wanted music. I wanted martial arts. I wanted to make things because they were beautiful, expressive, or meaningful - not because they could help move inventory.

At the same time, I knew something else about myself: I wanted to make money.

That desire was not abstract. I wanted stability and financial freedom because I understood what it felt like not to have them. My father could sell, but he was not especially financially savvy, and I grew up craving the security that money seemed able to provide. Art mattered to me, but financial freedom mattered more.

That tension shaped the beginning of my career. I wanted the independence to create whatever I wanted, but I first needed to learn how to support myself.

Learning Through Music

I tried to start businesses and made many of the mistakes new entrepreneurs make. I had ambition, but not yet the knowledge or experience to turn that ambition into something reliable. Then I made what still feels like one of the craziest decisions of my life: I tried to become a singer.

I worked on music for five years. I did not become a star, but I built an audience, completed projects, and learned lessons that would later shape everything I did professionally.

Music taught me discipline. It taught me that becoming an artist was not a moment of inspiration; it was a process. You practiced, studied, produced, published, listened, adjusted, and returned to work. It taught me how to build a project over time and, more importantly, how to learn. The work ethic I later brought to marketing was developed through music, oddly enough.

Music also helped me understand what I did not want. I realized I did not want fame. I wanted the money I had imagined would come with it. Those were not the same goal, and confusing them could have cost me many more years.

By the time I was around twenty-three, I knew three things. I could work hard. I could learn. And I still needed to make money.

So I started looking for a job.

Doing SEO Without Knowing It

I was good at writing - not only songs, but writing in general. So the first job I found was not exactly writing songs. It was writing news.

I believed I had been hired simply to write articles. I did not understand that I was entering marketing, and I certainly did not think of myself as an SEO professional.

My assignment was straightforward: write two news articles a day, approximately 300 words each. I went to Google Trends, looked for stories that were beginning to attract attention, tried to publish early, and followed the SEO recommendations inside Yoast, a WordPress plugin. At that point, my understanding of optimization was simple: I wanted Yoast's indicator to turn green.

That was it. I was not thinking about search intent, website architecture, backlink profiles, schema markup, or conversion. I was trying to write something relevant, publish it at the right moment, and satisfy the instructions on the screen.

I repeated that process more than 2,000 times over three and a half years.

Writing itself came easily to me. Consistency did not. Producing two articles every day sounds simple until you have to do it again tomorrow, and the day after that, while studying and managing the rest of your life. I was not always as consistent as I should have been, but I was good enough to bring traffic to the site and keep the job.

My mother kept telling me, "Keep that job. You never know where it will take you."

She was right.

The job did not pay much, but it became the first piece of a career I could not yet see. It gave me a portfolio, a work habit, and practical experience writing for search before I understood that search engine optimization was the name of the technique I was using.

This is one of the strange things about a career: sometimes the opportunity that changes your direction does not announce itself as important. It looks like a small job you are tempted to abandon.

The Hardest Writing Job I Ever Had

When it was time to complete my university internship, my writing experience opened another door. I found an internship with a foreign company, one of the best-paid opportunities available to me. It paid about 400 euros a month. I kept the news-writing job, which paid another 200 euros, so I was making approximately 600 euros while I was still a student.

That amount may not sound extraordinary, especially outside Colombia. Everyone moves at a different pace. For me, at that point, it was progress. I had not graduated, and I was already earning considerably more than many interns around me.

The internship was in cybersecurity content. For nine months, I wrote 622 articles averaging roughly 750 words each. I wrote 611 of them manually. Only eleven were written with help from ChatGPT, which became available near the end of that period.

The scale was brutal. I spent six months as an intern earning 400 euros and continued for another three months as a freelancer for about 450 euros. It was not much of a raise for staying, and the workload was affecting me. I became depressed. Eventually, I quit.

At the time, I thought the main thing I was learning was cybersecurity, not SEO. In retrospect, I was also developing an enormous tolerance for research, deadlines, repetition, and unfamiliar technical subjects. I learned how quickly a person can build knowledge when there is no alternative but to sit down and produce.

Still, there is a difference between difficult work that develops you and difficult work that empties you. Leaving was necessary.

I kept the newspaper job because those 200 euros gave me a little oxygen, but they were not enough to live on. I needed another job.

Choosing SEO

I then joined a marketing agency. I began as a writer and also started finding freelance clients. My income improved before I had even graduated. In September 2023, the month I finished university, I made about $1,500. In Colombia, that put me ahead of where many new graduates begin.

I was proud of that progress, but I still wanted more. More importantly, I was beginning to see how I could get there.

There were two paths in front of me. I could become a better-paid content writer, or I could develop into an SEO specialist and eventually lead the division in which I worked. Content writing was one part of SEO, but SEO covered a much larger system and had greater demand. It offered more ways to create value and, therefore, more room to grow.

I chose SEO.

From that point, I became a dedicated student of everything beyond the article itself. I used the agency as a place to learn by doing. I volunteered for different SEO tasks, studied how the pieces connected, and got my hands on as much of the work as possible. Keyword research led to competitor analysis. Content led to website architecture. Websites led to technical performance, local visibility, backlinks, measurement, and strategy.

After roughly a year at the agency, I became its SEO manager, a role I performed for about three years. By the end of that chapter, I was running the entire web development department.

That progression did not happen because I followed a perfect career plan. It happened because I kept working on something before I understood where it could take me, then recognized an opportunity and decided to study it seriously.

Why I Wrote This Book

There is a personal reason this book exists. I set myself the goal of publishing a book before I turned thirty, and this is my thirtieth-birthday gift to myself. That deadline helped me begin, but it is not the main reason I chose this subject.

I wrote this book to share the philosophy that guides my work. It is less concerned with collecting techniques than with the strategy and mindset required to succeed in search marketing. Platforms, algorithms, and tactics change. A clear understanding of what marketing is for - and a disciplined way of making decisions - lasts longer.

The ideas come from my experience: thousands of articles, years of agency work, freelance projects, client campaigns, mistakes, experiments, wins, and the patterns I saw repeat across them. Some of my conclusions are conventional. Others may be controversial. I will tell you clearly what I believe, what I have observed, and what I would do if I had to begin again.

The central lesson is simple: do not assume. Research.

Do not assume you know how customers describe a service. Find the words they actually use. Do not assume you know what Google wants to rank. Examine what is already ranking. Do not assume a competitor is bad news. Treat that competitor as proof that a market exists and as a source of information about how the market behaves. Do not assume a report full of numbers will keep a client. Learn what the client needs to understand.

Although the examples focus on search, the philosophy applies across marketing: observe, form a theory, test it, measure what happened, and adjust.

That is how I learned search marketing before I even knew I was doing it. It is how I built a career from a small writing job. And it is the approach I will share with you in the pages that follow.