Jeff Hawley is founder of HashtagJeff, where he and his team share a passion for developing tools to make SEO, digital content creation, and digital content management more successful for online publishers.
Jeff Hawley has always been a free spirit. He realized early in life that he didn’t like to be told what to do without understanding why. That didn’t always go over well with a father in the military.
As a kid, Jeff’s self-determination translated to an entrepreneurial mindset. He liked working for himself, and he was always looking for different ways to make money. By the time he went to college, he still didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he knew he wanted to own his own business. During his final year, he decided to learn as much as he could about digital marketing because he felt it would serve him no matter what business he pursued.
Little did he know his future business would be digital marketing itself.
Following college, Jeff worked for himself almost exclusively. He founded a small SEO agency that was acquired by a much larger agency, where he continued working for a few years to get experience with big businesses. In order to become as much of an expert in digital marketing as possible, he also joined a large auto dealership for a short time to gain experience with the paid side of search engine marketing.
When Jeff started working with bloggers between 2016 and 2017, he quickly realized they were his tribe. Within a few months of auditing a number of lifestyle and food blogs, he began making plans to go out on his own again.
Today, Jeff focuses 100% on digital publishers who primarily monetize from online traffic. They consist of food, DIY, travel, finance, and general lifestyle websites. Jeff performs site audits and teaches site owners and their teams how to incorporate SEO into their processes to increase site visibility and revenue.
Jeff prides himself on making SEO more approachable for his clients.
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Questions
Questions:
What did you do before you became hashtag Jeff?
Knowing what you know, what would you have named your business?
What did you go to school for?
You worked for a bunch of different companies, when did you know you were ready to leave and branch out on your own?
Can you talk about SEO with purpose?
Can you give me an example of when you would break a rule?
Do you want to expand on not fearing Google?
You’re big on creating ecosystems, can you explain that?
Are you talking about trending recipes or are you talking more about categories?
Can you talk about content auditing?
What would someone have to do to get into your community?
It’s not just food bloggers right?
Do you cook?
Have you had a food failure?
What is your favorite cuisine?
If you were to go out to a restaurant, where would you go and what would you order?
