Today we’d like to introduce you to Julia Bocchese.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
It all started with a travel photography blog. I moved to Philadelphia from North Carolina right after college and I only knew one person there, so I started a photography blog to share my explorations in my new city with my friends and family. As I traveled more, it turned into a travel blog, and I learned SEO and social media marketing to reach more people.
After about two years working at my job, I quit to become a freelancer. I was doing quite a mix of different jobs, like Instagram management, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses. I loved doing content writing and was using the SEO strategies I had learned for my own content, and the businesses started to notice that they were getting more traffic from Google.
After about a year of freelancing, I realized that there was a need for SEO work for small businesses and I really enjoyed the mix of writing, data, and problem-solving, so I made the switch to focusing on SEO. I really didn’t enjoy working on Instagram anymore, so I made the switch to Pinterest management since Pinterest is a visual search engine and uses similar strategies to SEO.
Today, I’ve had my business for over four years and help small businesses around the world rank higher on Google and Pinterest to reach their ideal clients. I love getting to watch their businesses grow and see the impact my work has on my clients’ lives.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Running a business definitely has its challenges. I jumped into owning a business without knowing what I was doing and had to learn everything involved with the legalities, taxes, and client management as I went.
My business had very slow growth at first as I was trying to figure everything out, and it wasn’t until I was probably two years into my business that I started to feel like I had a handle on everything. And then the pandemic happened last year, and so many of my clients were affected, which meant I lost a lot of business. I had to learn how to pivot and be resilient in new ways, and my business is definitely stronger now for it.
I was also in graduate school for most of the time I’ve run my business. I actually started freelancing to have a flexible schedule for grad school, and I didn’t know where my freelancing work was going to take it. I studied history with a focus on the Viking Age, so balancing schoolwork that was very different from the work I was doing in my business was a big challenge.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am an SEO and Pinterest Consultant for creative small businesses. I help my clients rank higher on Google and Pinterest so they can reach more of their ideal clients to grow their businesses and get more of their time back.
I also focus a lot on teaching with my business and offer courses and resources to help businesses learn SEO and Pinterest themselves, and my goal is to make SEO and Pinterest easy to understand and implement for all businesses. I also recently started teaching as an adjunct professor and taught the first SEO course at Drexel University. My proudest moments are when I get the email from a client saying the just got their first client from Google or Pinterest. It makes me so happy to watch my clients’ businesses grow.
How do you think about luck?
I think my business has succeeded more from hard work than good luck. I’ve had slow and steady growth, and I haven’t had anything go viral or reached a million dollars my first year in business or anything like that. The pandemic was certainly a stroke of bad luck, but it helped that I wasn’t alone in that and everyone was trying to support and help each other.
Contact Info:
- Email: julia@juliareneeconsulting.com
- Website: https://juliareneeconsulting.com/
- Instagram: @juliareneeconsulting
- Other: https://throughjuliaslens.com/
Image Credits
Branding photos are by Kristen Gregor of Petal and Glass Photography.
