Episode 162 – A Chat With Vassy Valchanova

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.