Episode 162 – A Chat With Vassy Valchanova

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Show Notes

This was a live, in-person Hallway Chat between Topher and Vassy at WordCamp Europe 2022 in Porto, Portugal.

Vassy’s Site: https://valchanova.me/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasvalch/

Twitter | @vasvalch

Episode Transcript

Topher: All right, what is your name? 

Vassilena: It’s Vassilena, but I use the short version Vassy. 

Topher: Oh, right. 

Vassilena: First off, it’s easier for internationals to pronounce, and also because when someone uses my full name in our language it’s almost as if they’re mad with you.

Topher: Oh, yes.

Vassilena: So like I always get the flashback of my mother saying, like, I never fix the bed or something. 

Topher: Yes, I understand. Where are you from?

Vassilena: From Bulgaria. I’m originally from Sofia, I lived there most of my life with a couple of skips here and there throughout Europe. 

Topher: All right, cool. Well, where else? Where have you lived? 

Vassilena: I lived in Leeds for half a year and I also lived in a small town called Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. It’s right north near Groningen. 

Topher: Just for fun or school or something?

Vassilena: School. Both were related to university studies and so on. But it was nice to see something different. 

Topher: Oh, yeah. And what do you do with WordPress?

Vassilena: I’m a digital marketer, and a lot of the work that I do is to help companies, either ones who are just starting out or companies that have been around for some time but they’ve mostly acquired new customers through word of mouth to make their marketing better, to have a structured plan or how to do marketing. A big percentage of that is related to content marketing. So any form of creating the blog posts or webinars or whatever form makes sense for their audience. And WordPress being in score also a content platform that’s usually where our routes connect.

I also have some clients who wanted to move to a different platform and I personally suggested using WordPress, because I know my way around it. So it will even be easier for me to help them out down the line.

Topher: Sure. 

Vassilena: But also because it’s very usable. So it’s user-friendly, people can quickly get into it.

Topher: You’re speaking, right, this weekend?

Vassilena: Yeah. 

Topher: What’s your topic? 

Vassilena: I just spoke this morning actually about building content marketing personas. So this is sort of similar to like most people have heard about buyer personas or user personas. And when I shoot that to, say, content marketing persona, that means any type of audience that consumes your content.

So this can be new people who just hear about you through your content and they might be interested in your services, or it might be existing users who get educational content from you to get better at using your product or service, or it might even be like thought leaders who are not your core target market but will learn about you and hopefully recommend you to others.

Topher: Okay. Which came first? Digital marketing or WordPress?

Vassilena: They were pretty much tied for the first part because I actually… the way I got into WordPress was through blogging. So back in my first year of university, and this is gonna, you know, diverge sort of my age, but that’s fine completely by me. Back in first year in university, we have a class on digital media and journalism. I studied in journalism school. 

So back in first year they told us about this newfangled thing called a blog. This was very interesting to me. So I just decided to create a blog and to see what all the fuss is about, with no plan or agenda. I’ve been blogging for 15 or 16 years now. 

Topher: Wow. 

Vassilena: First two were on BlogSpot but then I quickly switched over because, I mean, WordPress is better.

Topher: Do you still have those blogs? Like do you have a 15-year-old blog?

Vassilena: The original version was in Bulgarian, and still the archive of that still exists locally. Then in 2016, I switched to a new domain and a version in English. So now that’s the only place where I create content.

Topher: Gotcha. Cool. Do you use WordPress outside of work? Like do you have a personal blog or kept pictures and whatnot?

Vassilena: I think the most interesting personal use that I get was when I was… Let me see. It must have been when I was in the UK. Yeah, exactly when I lived for half a year in the UK, I created a blog for a stuffed elephant that I had with me there to share with… It was a gift from my close friends at my going away party at home. So I put it in my luggage and I started blogging from the perspective of the elephant, obviously, to just keep them up to date with what’s happening with me-

Topher: That’s really fun.

Vassilena: …outside of Facebook or whatever. 

Topher: That’s really fun. WordPress is very different now than it was five years ago. Have you liked the changes? Do you like Gutenberg?

Vassilena: I do. I find it much easier for me because I’m obviously a marketer, not a developer. So I need something that’s easy to create and easy to, you know, move stuff around, like the homepage or something like that. And I found a few really nice themes, even the one that I use for my personal website. It’s been super helpful to have like readymade blocks that you can move around, that you can repurpose on different pages, and so on. So I’m pretty happy with that.

Topher: Cool. How much practical webpage building do you do? Like do you tell your customers, “You should do this,” and they go do it? Or do they pay you to build out a website or make a webinar or something?

Vassilena: I’m not a developer as I already said. But still, I would often find some of the stuff easier to do online or with their marketing team rather than outsource to developers. So what we usually have is if it’s a new website, let’s say, there will be a developer partner who’s going to create everything, build the structure, you know, create a theme from scratch or repurpose one depending on the project.

And then when we go to actually creating different landing pages and so on, this would mostly be done either by me or I’ll be helping the marketing team, the in-house marketing team for the partner gets their hang of WordPress and continue to do that on their own.

Topher: All right. Do you have employees? Do you work alone?

Vassilena: I’m a one woman show. 

Topher: And do you like that? 

Vassilena: Yeah, I do. That’s actually one of the reasons why I went to freelancing already three years back. I was part of a company back then. And I’ve been an in-house marketer for close to 10, 12 years, something like that, by that point. And at one point I just felt that I want to take a break from managing teams because I was often liking the senior role there. So I wanted to take a step back and continue to focus on actually doing the work rather than managing people.

One of the previous bosses that I work with, he had the saying that a skillful surgeon would not always be a great hospital director. I’m more comfortable currently in the skilled surgeon section.

Topher: Are most of your clients local to you? Or do you work nationally or internationally?

Vassilena: Most of the clients are in, well, of course, a variety of regions, but mostly Northern America and Western Europe. I have very few clients that I still work with from Bulgaria. I mean, it’s also a question of, you know, the more experienced you get, the higher the rates are going to be and the more challenging the projects you want to do. In Bulgaria, the market is much less mature than I would like it to be to pause a challenge. So this is why I would most often work with international clients.

Topher: All right. Have you ever thought about living somewhere else? You can live anywhere.

Vassilena: Yeah, that’s true. Up until a few years ago, that wasn’t really an option because my husband he’s the marketing director of a big local eCommerce store. But I think that with COVID, one of the cool things is that their team also learned to work remotely and they’re getting quite good at that. So now that’s becoming more of a thing to think about.

I wouldn’t necessarily like, you know, at this point at least, consider living full-time somewhere else, but you know, spending a month in Lisbon or Porto by the way that will be great. We have this habit of going around and looking at real estate agency listings in the towns we visit. Here it’s been very interesting to see. 

Topher: Recently my kids have grown up enough that we left them. They kept our house, we moved out. My wife and I both work remotely and we’re like, “We could go anywhere.” So thank you very much for your time. It was very interesting.

Vassilena: That’s good to hear. 

Topher: I picked mostly random four people that I didn’t know, only one was a developer. Everybody else does something else, which makes me happy because there’s a stereotype that you have to be a developer or designer to do WordPress.

Vassilena: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s true. 

Topher: I like showing that there’s a lot more to it.

Vassilena: Cool. Awesome.

Topher: This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. This episode was recorded in person at WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal. Your host was Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sofia DeRosia for the music, and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.