London is Europe’s finance and business hub and it remains one of the important cities worldwide for innovation. This is why Fernando, the CEO of ClickDo Ltd, decided to build his digital marketing agency here. After graduating from university in Worcester he knew that he wanted to do his own thing and come to London. But how? He delved into books about business and technology and found an article in Forbes magazine that gave him the light-bulb moment: “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the future”!
He started his first blog, fernandobiz, after he moved to Queensbury, and shared his thoughts and knowledge about how to help small business owners in London. He fell in love with it and soon had his first clients, paying him a small monthly fee for his SEO services. ClickDo Ltd. was born and it was run by Fernando all alone in its humble beginnings. After his agency gained momentum he received more and more requests from local businesses in London and together with his friend Kasun, a self-taught web designer, and Logesh, a student of computer science at the time, he was able to build a business website and add services. To meet the ever-growing demand of his SEO services he hired more staff and Fernando quickly realised that they all benefited from gaining more digital skills needed to provide top quality services. In the beginning he would train them individually where needed, but this became more time-consuming with a growing number of employees. That’s when he decided to create ClickDo Academy online courses for SEO and digital marketing so that everyone could become an expert, even his own clients. Step by step Fernando built his own company and is a proud entrepreneur today, working on several projects and digital products simultaneously. Due to the success of his business he was able to move to Canary Wharf where he now has an office and an apartment with a view. If you want to learn more about Fernando’s personal journey to entrepreneurship read http://www.fernandobiz.com/.
Fernando has established an SEO and digital agency that now does so much more! Look at case studies on https://www.clickdo.co.uk/case-studies/ to see everything Fernando and his team do for their clients. But it doesn’t stop there. Fernando’s wider vision is to share all the knowledge and skills he has acquired so that others can also lead the digital nomad lifestyle and be their own boss. Therefore, he has built the ClickDo Academy as well as an SEO Blueprint and Facebook Remarketing courses and to make sure you apply everything you’ve learned, Fernando helps you getting started with your own blog or website by offering free webhosting for start-ups. See Fernando’s guide on how to start your own blog here https://www.clickdo.co.uk/how-to-start-a-blog/ and get to work! For the next step, creating your own SEO start-up, read this detailed article https://www.clickdo.co.uk/blog/how-to-start-seo-business/.
The statistics in London speak for themselves as TechCityUK reports: “In terms of sheer number of new digital tech businesses emerging London has seen the strongest growth, up by 42% in five years” compared to other UK cities. In terms of the UK market you can see the trend as well: “Over a five-year period, the total number of UK digital tech businesses grew by 28%. That is more than twice as fast as the growth in non-digital businesses (up 13%)”
Now, if you decide to help just a small percentage of these London businesses with SEO and digital marketing you’ll certainly make a good living as, according to Fernando, most clients will pay you on average a fee between £500 to £5,000 each, depending on the services you offer them. He claims that you can easily get 5 clients on board with the support of ClickDo, whether you want to be a content writer, web designer or digital marketeer. And it’s a win-win situation as you can also support your own business by applying your skills to ranking and marketing it. Fernando claims: “The internet is the new frontier, it’s where both the big and small brands compete for the masses in the battle for profits.” The opportunities are endless as you can see by ClickDo’s example – you can move into so many niches and digital services as more and more are emerging. London’s growing Tech City is creating more opportunity for digital workers and start-ups and the British government is encouraging this by offering more funding: “Overall, investment in UK technology businesses is buoyant. Analysis by the British Business Bank using data from Beauhurst shows a record £1.57 billion of equity finance was invested in the digital sectors in 2015, more than four times the level of investment in 2011”.
Therefore, Fernando says: “Ultimately, the goal is to support as many local businesses in London as possible in order for them to thrive and create more opportunities for Londoners”. He believes that every business’ success will depend on its rankings on Google, the most-used search engine in the world, and on their online presence and marketing. Therefore, it’s his mission to create more jobs in the digital economy as all parties will benefit from this. And if Londoners earn a decent salary they can live an amazing lifestyle in this city of endless opportunity, he claims. And TechCityUK confirm this by stating “Broadly speaking a high concentration of digital tech businesses is good for a local economy, since it is associated with highly skilled and higher paid employment”.
So, if Fernando can do it you can do it too!
Written By Manuela Willbold, who is a digital content creator and teacher by profession. She has developed an interest in the digital economy and technology. She writes for the ClickDo Blog as well as their clients and is also developing her own blogs in education.
