MonetizePros Giveaway Winner Interview – Chris Zilo

I’m sure you’re all aware of the giveaway we had here at MonetizePros a week before Black Friday – we gave away $14,523 worth of internet marketing tools, services and resources. Ranging from an annual pro plan of SEMRush to a years worth of hosting at BlueHost.

We used the KingSumo Giveaways plugin to run the campaign and it selects the winner for us automatically. It was still tough selecting the winner, for several reasons. We had a lot of people cheating the system with fake emails who had to be filtered out and many of the legitimate winners did not respond to our emails when we announced them as a winner – tough luck!

Zilo.me. He only had one entry but won in spite of that and answered our email within 10 minutes, now that’s dedication! Congratulations Chris!

Here’s a short interview we did with him.

Who are you and what do you do?

Christopher Zilo, I’m a director of technology and digital product development at Reboot with Joe – when I have spare time I try to blog my thoughts over here.

How did you get into internet marketing and why?

I’ve spent the bulk of my career working at internet startups in various roles from community, sales, operations and product development. No matter the role acquiring new customers, maintaining relationships and building revenue has always been of utmost importance and an overall strategic goal of any company I have worked for. Marketing (and internet marketing specifically) has always been core to achieving that goal and I’ve always worked closely with teams/directors/executives that are close to marketing.

What are your goals and ambitions when it comes to internet marketing?

In short: actionable metrics, measurable & realistic goals, and finally a return on investment. Part of effective marketing is establishing the right goals and following a commonsense approach to reaching them. Most companies will state goals along the lines of “find more customers,” that’s not nearly specific enough for me, I like getting “granular”. I have a strong desire to ensure “goals” include specific outcomes or percentage returns, have timeframes and often measure or take into account more than just “sales”.

How did you hear about MonetizePros?

Originally I found MonetizePros through search. Good ol’ SEO at work for you there 🙂

What was your first reaction, realizing you’ve won?

Disbelief, I never… win…. giveaways. Seriously though: I was really excited, had this incredible feeling of luck and was humbled.

Do you reckon the right tools are important for an internet marketer? Why?

Absolutely. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of marketing tools, marketing platforms and marketing service providers out in the market today. The right tool(s) for your company so often depend on what you are trying to do, or more specifically, your strategic goals and objectives. There is rarely ever a “perfect” or best fit option that works for “everyone.”

Can’t stress how important it is to me to evaluate tools, identifying every “want” and “need” or requirement, and carefully balancing those while working within any operational/marketing budget you may be working with. It’s not an easy thing to do, it can often be daunting, but it’s key to success and doing that hard work ahead of making significant marketing spends, helps you reach your goals more effectively/efficiently.

Which of the tools and services that you’ve won, are you most excited about?

It’s honestly hard to pick there are so many great tools here. If I had to pin it down to just a few then I’d have to go with the more expensive SEO & SEM tools included in the prizes like SEOmonitor, SEO PowerSuite, SEMRush. Those are some of the tools I can see myself using the most. Not enough folks make SEO a priority, it’s a mistake I’ve seen made time and again -> winning these prizes reminds me again the importance of SEO.

Which goals do you intend to achieve with the help of these tools? 

I’d like to focus on developing some more content for my blog, noting that organic search would be my primary acquisition source. I can really see these tools helping me with that goal. But to get more “granular” I’d like to increase organic search visits in the order of 10% over the next 3 months, then re-evaluate and set new goals.