Mompreneur in Business Against All Odds

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Ankitaa works as a Digital Marketing Strategist, with proficiency in web design, SEO, social media marketing, content development and brand management. She is the Founder of AnksImage which help organizations worldwide achieve higher online visibility, better brand presence, and more website traffic by creating and implementing highly successful digital marketing campaigns.

Mother of a rambunctious preschooler, she mostly works from home in Rudrapur (Uttarakhand), about 250 kms from New Delhi (India). She also runs an offset printing firm, alongside a partnership with her husband in a corrugated boxes manufacturing enterprise locally. She is the unofficial editor and soon-to-be official publisher of her father’s books. She loves getting immersed in the different worlds offered by books and movies. Nowadays she’s trying to be more healthy in life, and wants to get into app development soon. And maybe write a novel too!

City where you’re from: Rudrapur, Uttarakhand (India)

Hobbies: Reading, watching movies.

Favorite quote: “People will stare. Make it worth their while.” – Harry Winston

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Anki_Live

Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?

It was the need of the hour. I wanted to be financially independent after marriage. In India, it’s still difficult to step out of the house after marriage – one has to get a good offer/reason to do so. I was told to join the “family business”. I did and I soon realized I was part of the business only in namesake. So I opted to start an online business to provide image consulting services. My image consulting business evolved into digital marketing over the years, and now I’m working full-time as a Digital Marketing Strategist for businesses in India, US and China.

Who were your biggest influences? Was there a defining moment in your life?

My biggest influences are my parents. My father has taught me to work with ethics, and never compromise on quality of work. My mother has always been a housewife, and she drilled into my head that I need to be financially independent, be more than what the world expects me to be. She’s the voice inside my head, all the time.

The latest defining moment in my life was when my daughter was born. I had a high-risk pregnancy, which means I spent all the months of pregnancy under complete bed rest, and yet with all the precautions and care, she was born at 33 weeks. I was told she fought with destiny to be with me, and I promised myself that I will be the fighter my daughter deserves. Since then I’ve been a warrior in life – I fight to get the best projects to work on so I can get her the best of everything I can afford, I fight daily to be the role model she can look up to as she grows up into a young lady, and I fight to not lose myself as an individual while I try to be a good mother, daughter and wife.

Now

What are you working on? How did you come up with this idea?

I am helping businesses reach their full potential with digital marketing. There are many businesses worldwide who don’t have a clue as to how digital marketing and proper online strategy can do wonders to their marketing and sales efforts overall. I am providing a one-stop solution of digital marketing services like web design, SEO, social media, content writing, content development and branding for organisations looking to explore the online world for better business.

Truth be told, I had no clue what to work on. I was interested in image consulting, and that’s what I started. My business was driven by consumer demand. People liked my image consulting, so they asked me if I could use my ideas of image consulting to write for them. Writing then evolved into designing. I already had an affinity for web development, so I started my own website, and seriously took up SEO and social media for myself because I couldn’t find anyone in India to do all that for me at that time, a decade ago. Then I realized I could offer what I had learnt for myself to other people who were already interested in my writing and branding skills. And that’s how slowly I turned into a full-time digital marketing agency.

How is your product/service different and unique? What has been your favorite moment with it? What’s the vision?

I am the USP of my business. I am active on social media, and I never promote my services. My business leads are people who have found me on social media, and have come to me based on what I talk online. I do use different marketing strategies for my clients, but my entire business is based on word of mouth marketing and my writing skills on social media.

My favorite moment is when people can’t believe it that I work from home while hanging out with my preschooler.

My vision is to be able to make my business more dynamic. I want to add AI to my business model, and get into content intelligence that boost branding.

If you do Facebook ads, what types of creatives/campaigns do you use (we like specifics)? If you don’t, what untapped marketing channels do you take advantage of?

It’s been a long time since I used any Facebook ads for my own business, but I actively use Facebook ad campaigns for my clients. I particularly like Boosted posts, instead of traditional ad campaigns on Facebook, and that too with the Preferred Audience turned on.

I plan to use Twitter ads for one of my clients next month, but I don’t want to use Google ads ever. All in all, I am more comfortable with using free tools of marketing, rather than paid ones.

Did you experience failure along the way? What did you learn from it?

I experience failure every month. Most people reject me outright when they learn I work from home, and that too from a place which is nowhere near any major city of India. Then even if they are okay with remote location, many can’t handle the fact that most of the time my preschooler hangs out with me. Not that it has ever compromised the quality of my work, but these people associate women and children with holidays, and they feel I will use my daughter as an excuse in the future for poor quality of work.

It was very depressing in the beginning but now I have learnt to recognize the signs. I only speak to those leads who are genuinely interested in hiring me because they already have had witnessed my work somewhere somehow. It’s not me, it’s them. It’s their loss that they let go of an individual who could have really added tremendous value to their organization. Maybe I’m a fool to believe that, but I believe I’m truly better off with such people in my work life.

Value-add questions

Give the readers the best entrepreneurship advice you have.

Don’t wait for someone to get your started. You want to do something, get up and do it yourself. Forget your ego, and concentrate on what you want. Be polite always. Skills can be picked up along the way, but your personality can take you places if you’re true to yourself.

Teach us something about {internet marketing, social media ads, fundraising, sales funnels or another topic} Can you recommend any favorite websites to learn that topic?

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to promote your brand because you are engaging with the consumer directly and privately. Most users online are passive social media users. They do not engage directly, rather they are actively involved in digital listening. So the best way to reach out to these people is via emails. And the best way to hook them to sign up and share their email addresses with you would be through valuable content upgrades like ebooks or free trials.

I follow the blogs by HubSpot, Buffer, Neil Patel, Syed Balkhi, and HootSuite. Yoast is also really good.

While working on your project, have you come across any interesting bit of knowledge that you’d like to share? (i.e. any new research finding, any new platforms, some novel management technique, etc)

Here are the 9 Best Tools that help in Content Marketing:

1. Outbrain
2. Mailchimp
3. Evernote
4. Easel.ly
5. MixPanel
6. Atomic Ally
7. HubSpot
8. BuzzSumo
9. GIMP

What daily habits do you have that allow you to perform at your peak?

I work out in the mornings and always cook dinner at home. Both activities help me unwind and destress. When things get more hectic, I read a passionately romantic novel by Nora Roberts and I am ready to jump back into the whirlpool known as life.

What should an entrepreneur focus on?

As an entrepreneur, it is important to focus on people working with you, around you and for you. It’s very easy to get lost in getting more clients, expanding your business, or simply working on your product or service. But at the end of the day, it’s the people who matter, starting from those you work for, to the people who work for you, and finally to the people who wait for you at home. If you lose your humanity, you lose sight of what’s important and things go bad.

Walk us step-by-step through the process that you had to go through to get from the early stages to where you are today.

I started my business, AnksImage, back in 2008 a few months I got married. Being a housewife didn’t suit me at all, I was bored out of my mind. So I had many many discussions with my husband, spent hours and hours online, and finally started my business by launching my website www.anksimage.com in 2009. My first client was in New Delhi and I travelled 6 hours by car to do a half hour session on image building or branding. It was glorious.

Then started many such trips to New Delhi and I was slowly able to establish myself as a consultant in branding and image consulting that companies started approaching me for training and other services. All of it happened through WOM – word of mouth marketing.

Meanwhile my website started getting a lot of hits internationally as well, and I got my first writing assignment in 2010. It was a copywriting gig that lasted for more than a year, and the person who hired me was a marketer himself. Anton Rose gave me all the books I had to read up on content writing, link building, marketing strategies, etc. basically all different modules of digital marketing.

While I was working for Anton on websites, copywriting, blogging, and online submissions, I started applying the same techniques on my website, and it was a great success. I got more companies to hire me directly and I started working on web design and social media, as well as content writing. During these projects, I understood the importance of SEO, and finally by 2012, I was working full fledged in web design, SEO, social media, content writing and branding.

I took a long sabbatical from late 2013 to late 2014. Once my baby was old enough to not require constant supervision by my standard, I got ready to get back to work. Given my reputation, I was confident I would be choosing the best projects. Soon that belief was crushed when everyone congratulated me for being a new mom but no one offered me any project. So basically I had to start from scratch.

So I did.

I called everyone I had ever worked with. I emailed everyone I crossed paths with. And in six months, I landed my first job as a marketer for a company in Texas. The person who hired me was someone I worked with when I was living in the US and working at Fisher Price (New York) in Business Intelligence Reporting. He knew me and gave me this opportunity not because he knew how good I was in digital marketing, but because he told me he remembered how hard-working, diligent and technical I was. He even told me to get back into Business Intelligence Reporting in IBM Cognos because I was already certified in Cognos, but I was more comfortable with digital marketing. I still work for him.

I signed up on freelancing websites – now there are so many in India as compared to what it was like back in 2008 – and started getting projects from those sources too. Thankfully, I was able to turn most of these clients into monthly retainer clients, some of whom I still work with presently.

Back in 2016, I joined Quora and I started answering questions solely for the purpose of helping people. Everyone loved my no-nonsense, no-self-promotion answers, and I became one of the Most Viewed Writers in Content Writing on Quora. And that’s when I started getting leads through Quora also. I’ve never looked back since.

Now I am focused on the regular clients of AnksImage, and freelance only when I love the projects coming my way. I get to pick the projects I want to work with. That’s a privilege I don’t want to lose. And I will try my best to work on preserving this privilege.

What are some of your favorite books?

I am a big Nora Roberts fan. I can read her books anytime, whenever I get the opportunity. I don’t read non-fiction because I feel that it will affect my own writing skills. And thats why I read 10-15 blogs every day.

Where do you see yourself and your product in a couple years?

I see myself deep in app development, with apps – free and premium – coming out every few months that help with content development. I want to integrate AI into my services and foray in content intelligence, most possibly with the support of an app that I create.

I also want to write a fiction novel.

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