A man with many skills: Chris Makara

With over 18 years of experience, Chris Makara has built a strong portfolio in the digital marketing industry. In 2003, Chris created eCommerce websites that generated approximately $ 200,000 in revenue during his undergraduate studies.

Chris recalls, “Before there wasn’t a lot of information about website building or digital marketing, so it was all a trial and error. I learned everything on the job, from analytics to SEO to content creation. This experience helped me build a strong foundation in multiple facets of digital marketing. I used this experience to create numerous websites. MySpace was very popular at the time, so I created a Myspace for Ford Mustangs. I grew this site to a little over 10,000 users in less than two years.

In addition, I had a full list of sponsors and made some recurring income from this website. Eventually I sold it to an investor. Then I switched to another website using the same platform and started a social network website for dogs. Again, people loved it as they would act like their dogs on this social networking website. In less than a year, I had roughly 7,500 users. Finally, a competitor bought the website because they wanted the customer database. “

“Since then, I’ve done a lot of client work, a lot of design, content, SEO, paid search, and other freelance work. Also, I worked full time for a public company on their digital marketing.I moved to a new company about a month ago where I’m on the digital team and hopefully it will grow and expand as I get used to everything they do do and where they need help. “

Chris is currently working on his latest project, Bulk.ly, This will help you plan your social media posts. Via Bulk.ly you can

• Bulk upload of content: Create hundreds of social media updates by uploading a Microsoft CSV file.
• Recycle posts: Automatically recycle all of your social media updates.
• Shuffle Posts: Determine the order in which posts are sent to your social accounts.
• Hashtag assignment: Create hashtags for any social media platform. Even mix multiple tags per channel.
• Drip planning: Schedule your updates to drip onto your social media accounts multiple times an hour, day, or week.

So what was the motivation to start Bulk.ly? How did you come up with the idea?

“In my previous job, I was part of a very small digital marketing team. An essential part of my job was planning social media posts and updates. The content we shared was evergreen and could be shared again. I found myself scheduling the same posts over and over again, and felt like I was wasting my time doing something manual and repetitive.

We used buffer to schedule updates, and so I would add updates every week, and as soon as they were released I copied them and rescheduled them. That’s when I knew there had to be a better way. Basically, that’s what led me to create Bulk.ly. Now you can create hundreds of social media posts or recycle your current posts automatically. It has grown in the meantime and now works not only with Buffer, but also with Hootsuite. It also has various connections to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram. “

Who do you think is your target market and how do you find your customers?

“The target market is primarily solo preneurs or small businesses with one person doing a lot of things, and social media is one of the many daily chores. So it’s really meant for someone who just wants to spend some time doing manual tasks, so you can work on more important things or things that you can’t automate. But it can be used by anyone; we even have large corporations as customers using it to automate their updates. “

“I get a lot of search traffic from my blog posts because I have a fairly active blog. I also run a lot of Facebook ads for specific audiences and collaborate with other websites to use their audiences and meet new people.”

“Well, there isn’t one perfect tool for everyone. There are flaws on all the different platforms. So you have to do something or provide something that another tool doesn’t. For example, there weren’t many tools associated with Buffer, but there are more of them now than they were a few years ago. So it comes down to what features you have that other websites don’t. “

“Not a lot of sites allow you to recycle posts or allow you to do bulk uploads using a CSV file, which Bulk.ly does. Bulk.ly also lets you use a single blog post url and it creates social Media updates for you from This blog post. This makes it easy for you to create updates for new content. It imports potential post ideas for you. You can keep, edit, delete and schedule them in your social media accounts. It’s a handy feature and for the next iteration I’m testing, but instead of including a single post url, you can include your blog’s RSS feed and automatically get new blog posts from your blog. Again, you can create updates and schedule to be published automatically. “

How has the growth been so far and how has the market responded to you?

“So in the beginning it was all about education because there aren’t many tools that do what Bulk.ly does. So it takes a bit of education to guide them through using them as it’s not as simple as other tools. It’s all about getting the onboarding right, the in-app tooltips, and the like. But once people see how it works and how they can benefit from it, they are long-term with it. “

What is Bulk.ly’s future strategy?

“So the strategy is to really refine the functionality on the website. I don’t want to add so many features that it gets overwhelming, just prioritize the most important things that will bring the greatest benefit to users. It’s really about growing the user base. As the user base grows and there is more revenue with room to develop, the company will eventually grow. “

So, as an entrepreneur, what would your short and long-term goals be for Bulk.ly?

“In the short term, it’s really just trying to build brand awareness for the app, increase the user base and scale it up. I’m the only person running it right now so I take care of everything but development, I want to be able to scale the user base so that I can essentially attract people to help me get on even further grow.”

What changes would you like to see in the industry? If any?

“For me, it’s the APIs that are available to the various collaboration tools. Some are pretty open, but for some it’s tough. Integration with Twitter, for example, is easy because you can do whatever you need to. However, some platforms like Pinterest find it difficult to get a grip on their API. I would like a little more transparency as I have users who want to use Bulk.ly with Pinterest, but if I can’t get access to the API, I can’t offer this service. “

Chris adds, “I enjoy learning something new every day. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and if I didn’t learn something new, I probably still wouldn’t do what I’m doing because there is a new challenge every day. In addition, this motivates me and motivates me to push ahead. “

Finally, what would you say are the five most important skills you need to be successful in your field?

1. Understand analysis and data because you don’t know what works or doesn’t work without it.
2. A good understanding of SEO is a must. SEO is essentially free traffic, so you need to know how to get organic traffic to your website.
3. I think you need to have a good understanding of the personas of the type of people you are trying to target, mostly your audience.
4. A basic understanding of paid search is a must. Because on many platforms, organic traffic is not only really available. So you have to pay to play. You need to understand how paid advertising works across different platforms.
5. Understanding how everything works on your website is important because everyone needs to work together. The end goal is to redirect the traffic to your website. So you need to understand the impact of each component on your website.