IAM1201- Founder Grows Businesses through SEO Strategies
Podcast Interview with Tessah Aihara
Tessah has been building, ranking, and flipping websites since 2009. Her biggest accomplishment was selling her craft site for $143,000 in 2017, which changed her life completely.
She now runs an SEO agency in Japan that helps moms and small business owners grow their businesses online through proven and streamlined SEO strategies. Tessah's favorite part of the day is when she gets to chat with clients who are excited about the progress they're making together!
- CEO Hack: Reading my Bible the moment I wake up
- CEO Nugget: You're equipped for good work
- CEO Defined: Jumping at opportunities that 10x our business
Website: https://theseomama.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramintessah-aihara/
My Keyword Research Miniworkshop – https://ramintessahaihara.podia.com/keyword-research-made-simple
Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE
Transcription
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00:18 – Intro
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:45 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Tessa Ihera of the SEO Mama. Tessa, it's great to have you on the show.
00:56 – Tessah Aihara
Hello, everyone. So happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
01:00 – Gresham Harkless
No problem. Super excited to have you on and hear about all the awesome things that you're doing. But before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Tessa so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Tessa has been building, ranking, and flipping websites since 2009. Her biggest accomplishment was selling her craft site for $143,000 in 2017, which changed her life completely. She now runs an SEO agency in Japan that helps moms and small business owners grow their businesses online through proven and streamlined SEO strategies. Tessa's favorite part of the day is when she gets to chat with her clients who are excited about the progress they're making together. Tessa, super excited to have you on and hear all of the awesome things that you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:42 – Tessah Aihara
Yes. I'm so excited. Thank you for that wonderful introduction.
01:46 – Gresham Harkless
Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you for doing all the wonderful things, and I love that we're going to get that opportunity to kind of delve a little bit deeper into that. So I guess before we touch into, like, how you work with your clients, I wanted to rewind the clock, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
02:00 – Tessah Aihara
Okay. So in 2008, I was a freelancer in Upwork, and my first gig was to rewrite articles for a lady doing affiliate SEO. I was kind of like, what could you earn money doing this kind of website? I got to learn how to do that. I'm going to do that. But I. I'm going to build my own website as well. So I jump right. In building websites. So I learned SEO while applying it. So, I mean, I didn't offer complicated, I just want to build those sites and what do I need? So they said, oh, I need SEO. I need to learn SEO to run those sites. So I went right in and the rest is history.
02:40 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love that. I think so many times with, you know, digital marketing, I call them, I call them ingredients for platforms. The different ways you can market your business, I think change so rapidly. I almost feel like to really excel at them, you need to be able to learn while doing it a lot of times because they're adjusting their changes. So it sounds like you were able to kind of hit the ground running as a result of that.
02:59 – Tessah Aihara
Yes. I mean, it's sometimes our, like, more often than not. What's that? Analysis paralysis is. Yeah. Very common to a lot of people doing digital marketing. Right. So it's just like, you just got to do it, and then the learning comes. They are actually the best teachers' experience, right?
03:20 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you saying that phrase and that word because so many times people deal with that definitely outside of, you know, business. But when you start thinking about marketing and you think about all the different ways that you can market your business, you need to have your SEO in place, you need to have your website right, and you need to have your Facebook. All those things you're starting to analyze, what's the organic, what's the outreach now, what is the algorithm? There are so many different things that you can turn into that analysis by paralysis and you don't really get anywhere because you're constantly needing to make everything perfect. I love that you were able to kind of jump in and do that.
03:49 – Tessah Aihara
Yes, absolutely.
03:51 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about that craft site. So that's what you were able to sell. And that also opened up a lot of doors to you as well after, you know, you've done everything on Upwork.
04:01 – Tessah Aihara
Yes, you bet. Actually, no, actually that was not the first website that I built. So I built a lot of websites on different platforms, like blog posts, sorry, Blogspot, WordPress, the free accounts. I don't know if anyone in the audience remembers hub pages and squid lenses. I used to rank those sites and then when I ranked those pages on different platforms, I said, I want to build this exact niche on my own domain. So then I started testing the craft niche on my own domain and then when I, it was a little bit slow and then back in the day, because my learning in SEO is by applying it. So I didn't really know about SEO so I had to test and learn as I went. But then I said, I need to ask someone, I need help. So I pm a lot of people and there's one person who really replied to my emails and she is Shona, she is a good friend of mine.
She's really a good affiliate niche site builder as well. So once we, once we started working together and then I learned more about SEO, keyword research on-page SEO, and whatnot, so I started seeing traction and then the site took off from zero to nine K and then it went from seven k consistently. And that's the reason why I was able to sell it. After that, of course, because of that experience, then it was easy for me to build the next sites and flip the next sites. It's just opened a lot of doors because now I could suddenly, I suddenly became the SEO expert and I was like, you know, sometimes I'm not ready for that hype because I'm an introvert and I'm a very shy person.
05:48 – Gresham Harkless
But, yeah, but I love kind of hearing that journey because I think so many times people think that, you know, you just put a site up, you know, maybe you read a book about SEO or watch a YouTube video and you implement those things and then you have the success that you have. But I appreciate you talking about that journey because I think so many times people don't forget it. It seems to be kind of like a watershed moment where you start, you know, you continue to kind of hone your craft, get better and better and better. You're not seeing the fruits of your labor and then all of a sudden something just takes off because you've been working at your craft and talking with people, getting that mentorship for lack of a better term, and things just happen from there.
06:19 – Tessah Aihara
Yes. I mean, I have used a lot of sites in the past. I mean, I failed a lot of times and I burned a lot of money work because, my thought process was, by the way, I could not write. I suck at writing. So I didn't produce any content, any piece of content on those websites that I flipped. So I said how it won't stop me from producing websites. I mean, I'm going to go out there and do the one thing that I'm good at. I plan to teach English in Japan to fund my projects and niche sites. Initially, I made some mistakes with the money I earned. However, I learned valuable lessons about SEO and the importance of avoiding spammy links. Or if you, you know, you're stingy, your content marketing, it's not going to help you as well. So I mean, every challenge or roadblock that you hit, just makes you a better SEO or a digital marketer. So it's a win-win at the end of the day.
07:23 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I think that we often forget that failures and mistakes are some of the best lessons you can learn. It's no different in digital marketing as it is, you know, in business. So I love that, you know, I appreciate you for sharing that because I think there's such a misconception about success and what it takes to become successful. So I know you mentioned that a lot of people are calling you the SEO expert and you're kind of hesitant about that. So I won't call you that, but I'll call you the SEO mama. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. Could you take us through the SEO mama? How you work with your clients and how that process goes.
07:56 – Tessah Aihara
That's so smart, by the way. That's a good segue. I love it. Well, so the mission of our agency is to, help Mamas out there and the small business owners who they can't afford, afford, you know, high-priced SEO agencies. So that's what I noticed. By the way, our agency is just one year old. Exactly. Today is the day that I bought my domain name, from the domain name agency.
08:24 – Gresham Harkless
One year. Awesome. Yeah.
08:25 – Tessah Aihara
Thank you. So, literally, I started a business during the pandemic because I thought that a lot of people, a lot of business owners were suffering and they didn't have any money to spend on expensive SEO agencies. So I said, I'm just going to offer affordable packages out there. So that's the mission. Then, so when we onboard our clients, our expertise is our content strategy and our digital printhead. That's why we focus. Right. We actually have three, by the way. So the audit, the website calls it, and the setup. Then the next is the content strategy and then the digital pr. Because I believe in SEO, there are only two things, content and pr promotion. Well, we call it link building, but to jazz it out, pr.
09:14 – Gresham Harkless
What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for yourself individually, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart at mix unique?
09:23 – Tessah Aihara
Well, first we kind of like think that we are our target niche. I mean, our target niche is mommy bloggers and small business owners, but we are actually doing it on our own. So like I've told you, my background is building sites. So I learned SEO through that. So when I, every time I onboard a new client, sometimes a lot of, a lot of my clients don't have a website yet, so it's from scratch. I'm not nervous because that's what I've been doing since I learned SEO. So that's, I think that's the secret sauce there because, well, I mean, some people are, of course, they're doing SEO, but they're not personally involved in their niche. So for example, our target niche as well is course creators and I'm also a course creator. Recently, I have started creating my own courses, so I understand the process well. It's often said that we are our own target audience. We are first customers first. So in our agency, we have our in-house projects.
So we don't do stuff that we don't like to be applied to our in-house projects. So we test first on our in-house sites, on our, on our network and then we then, and once we know that it's effective and of course it's, we already know it because we've been doing it for a long time. So that that is the kind of like advantage of the clients we on board. We already have the track record and the experience and it's, and we are experts in our niche and our digital pr, we have been trying to do this because we just started offering digital pr strategy, and the reason why we started offering it because, I mean, it was my pain to find a process or a company that would really produce the result that I want link building wise.
I mean, I've tried everything and I bought links to a lot of vendors and I mean, I, it's not that those vendors suck, but it's just that it's expensive and it's not the quality that we want. So I said, why not just create the offer that we want in-house? So we started honing it and a lot of people are doing HarO right now, but what we are doing is Haro plus premium pr strategy. So it seems that you have a pr powerhouse that is also SEO savvy. So it's kind of like pr specialist, meet SEO specialist kind of thing. I think our clients have been very, very happy with the results because it's not just Harold's link or it's just not link-building. Suddenly. It's like a big media publication that you kind of like. You have a PR, a powerhouse pr publicist in your arsenal because you have us kind of like that. So I think that is one of our unique, unique secret sauces there.
12:05 – Gresham Harkless
I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
12:15 – Tessah Aihara
Okay. I'm a Christian, so I'm a firm believer. One that kind of like, really ten times my performance and really helped me, you know, crush those goals is just installing that Bible up and reading my Bible every, you know, the moment I wake up. It used to be not like that. I mean, I used to open social media the moment I opened my eyes, and it didn't help me, of course. You know, when I started reading the Bible every day, it helped me stay grounded and remember my core values, which I think is important. I mean, Covid taught us a lot of things. I've taught a lot of things about life, and you cannot do everything. You could not be the number one company. You could not beat that agency. I mean, that social media pressures you. But the Bible, the verses would tell you that you got this. I am here. You just got to be happy. Life is short, so it always brings me to those things. When you're happy, you accomplish more. When you're grounded, when you're calm, you're more productive.
13:28 – Gresham Harkless
Appreciate you for sharing that.
13:29 – Tessah Aihara
Awesome.
13:30 – Gresham Harkless
Yes. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around SEO, or it could be, you know, something around business. It's something you might tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
13:45 – Tessah Aihara
Okay, so it's still from the Bible. This is something that I always share with my friends and my family. It's one of my favorite verses, actually. It says that you are equipped for good work. I mean, we business owners, tend to complicate stuff. We focus on those nonessentials. Hey, do I have the perfect website? Hang on a minute. I haven't figured out my branding. Hang on a minute. I need to be on Instagram. I mean, you have to mute that because you are already equipped for good work. Just do it. I mean, just show your genius. A lot of people are waiting for you to show up, and you're already equipped for good work. So you don't need social media, you don't need your perfect logo. You are enough.
14:28 – Gresham Harkless
Truly appreciate that. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Tessa, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:39 – Tessah Aihara
Okay, so a CEO for me is just, you know, I've told you that we are already equipped for good work, right? So as someone who is already equipped for good work. So as a CEO who is equipped for good work, you just need to jump at every opportunity that would be ten times your business. Because when you ten. When you have that mindset, it means that you are also tending the lives of the team members that you have under you.
15:04 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely appreciate that, Sassa, and I appreciate your time as well. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best people can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things you and team are working on.
15:18 – Tessah Aihara
Okay. So I think a lot of people are interested now in learning more about SEO and learning how to or how could we serve them. We have our site, the SEO mama agency. Please go there. We're happy to just chat and collaborate with all of your listeners.
15:39 – Gresham Harkless
Yes, absolutely. The URL for that is going.
15:42 – Tessah Aihara
To be the seomama.com. sorry. Yeah, that's the seomoma.com dot.
15:46 – Gresham Harkless
Okay, perfect. So we'll also have that link and information in the show notes, but just in case anybody's driving or going around, I want to make sure that you're able to kind of access that. But I appreciate you tremendously, you know, for reminding us of, like, how important it is, you know, to build a business and how important it is to understand that failure is part of the journey and it's right in alignment with success and on an even deeper level, just how we can build that foundation within our source and the thing that really will remind us and keep us towards where we ultimately hope to be. So appreciate you so much for all that knowledge and wisdom. Definitely looking forward to the next time, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:20 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:18 - Intro
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:45 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Tessa Ihera of the SEO Mama. Tessa, it's great to have you on the show.
00:56 - Tessah Aihara
Hello, everyone. So happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
01:00 - Gresham Harkless
No problem. Super excited to have you on and hear about all the awesome things that you're doing. But before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Tessa so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Tessa has been building, ranking, and flipping websites since 2009. Her biggest accomplishment was selling her craft site for $143,000 in 2017, which changed her life completely. She now runs an SEO agency in Japan that helps moms and small business owners grow their businesses online through proven and streamlined SEO strategies. Tessa's favorite part of the day is when she gets to chat with her clients who are excited about the progress they're making together. Tessa, super excited to have you on and hear all of the awesome things that you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:42 - Tessah Aihara
Yes. I'm so excited. Thank you for that wonderful introduction.
01:46 - Gresham Harkless
Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you for doing all the wonderful things, and I love that we're going to get that opportunity to kind of delve a little bit deeper into that. So I guess before we touch into, like, how you work with your clients, I wanted to rewind the clock, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
02:00 - Tessah Aihara
Okay. So in 2008, I was a freelancer in Upwork, and my first gig was to rewrite articles for a lady doing affiliate SEO. I was kind of like, what could you earn money doing this kind of website? I got to learn how to do that. I'm going to do that. But I. I'm going to build my own website as well. So I jump right. In building websites. So I learned SEO while applying it. So, I mean, I didn't offer complicated, I just want to build those sites and what do I need? So they said, oh, I need SEO. I need to learn SEO to run those sites. So I went right in and the rest is history.
02:40 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love that. I think so many times with, you know, digital marketing, I call them, I call them ingredients for platforms. The different ways you can market your business, I think change so rapidly. I almost feel like to really excel at them, you need to be able to learn while doing it a lot of times because they're adjusting their changes. So it sounds like you were able to kind of hit the ground running as a result of that.
02:59 - Tessah Aihara
Yes. I mean, it's sometimes our, like, more often than not. What's that? Analysis paralysis is. Yeah. Very common to a lot of people doing digital marketing. Right. So it's just like, you just got to do it, and then the learning comes. They are actually the best teachers' experience, right?
03:20 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you saying that phrase and that word because so many times people deal with that definitely outside of, you know, business. But when you start thinking about marketing and you think about all the different ways that you can market your business, you need to have your SEO in place, you need to have your website right, and you need to have your Facebook. All those things you're starting to analyze, what's the organic, what's the outreach now, what is the algorithm? There are so many different things that you can turn into that analysis by paralysis and you don't really get anywhere because you're constantly needing to make everything perfect. I love that you were able to kind of jump in and do that.
03:49 - Tessah Aihara
Yes, absolutely.
03:51 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about that craft site. So that's what you were able to sell. And that also opened up a lot of doors to you as well after, you know, you've done everything on Upwork.
04:01 - Tessah Aihara
Yes, you bet. Actually, no, actually that was not the first website that I built. So I built a lot of websites on different platforms, like blog posts, sorry, Blogspot, WordPress, the free accounts. I don't know if anyone in the audience remembers hub pages and squid lenses. I used to rank those sites and then when I ranked those pages on different platforms, I said, I want to build this exact niche on my own domain. So then I started testing the craft niche on my own domain and then when I, it was a little bit slow and then back in the day, because my learning in SEO is by applying it. So I didn't really know about SEO so I had to test and learn as I went. But then I said, I need to ask someone, I need help. So I pm a lot of people and there's one person who really replied to my emails and she is Shona, she is a good friend of mine.
She's really a good affiliate niche site builder as well. So once we, once we started working together and then I learned more about SEO, keyword research on-page SEO, and whatnot, so I started seeing traction and then the site took off from zero to nine K and then it went from seven k consistently. And that's the reason why I was able to sell it. After that, of course, because of that experience, then it was easy for me to build the next sites and flip the next sites. It's just opened a lot of doors because now I could suddenly, I suddenly became the SEO expert and I was like, you know, sometimes I'm not ready for that hype because I'm an introvert and I'm a very shy person.
05:48 - Gresham Harkless
But, yeah, but I love kind of hearing that journey because I think so many times people think that, you know, you just put a site up, you know, maybe you read a book about SEO or watch a YouTube video and you implement those things and then you have the success that you have. But I appreciate you talking about that journey because I think so many times people don't forget it. It seems to be kind of like a watershed moment where you start, you know, you continue to kind of hone your craft, get better and better and better. You're not seeing the fruits of your labor and then all of a sudden something just takes off because you've been working at your craft and talking with people, getting that mentorship for lack of a better term, and things just happen from there.
06:19 - Tessah Aihara
Yes. I mean, I have used a lot of sites in the past. I mean, I failed a lot of times and I burned a lot of money work because, my thought process was, by the way, I could not write. I suck at writing. So I didn't produce any content, any piece of content on those websites that I flipped. So I said how it won't stop me from producing websites. I mean, I'm going to go out there and do the one thing that I'm good at. I plan to teach English in Japan to fund my projects and niche sites. Initially, I made some mistakes with the money I earned. However, I learned valuable lessons about SEO and the importance of avoiding spammy links. Or if you, you know, you're stingy, your content marketing, it's not going to help you as well. So I mean, every challenge or roadblock that you hit, just makes you a better SEO or a digital marketer. So it's a win-win at the end of the day.
07:23 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I think that we often forget that failures and mistakes are some of the best lessons you can learn. It's no different in digital marketing as it is, you know, in business. So I love that, you know, I appreciate you for sharing that because I think there's such a misconception about success and what it takes to become successful. So I know you mentioned that a lot of people are calling you the SEO expert and you're kind of hesitant about that. So I won't call you that, but I'll call you the SEO mama. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. Could you take us through the SEO mama? How you work with your clients and how that process goes.
07:56 - Tessah Aihara
That's so smart, by the way. That's a good segue. I love it. Well, so the mission of our agency is to, help Mamas out there and the small business owners who they can't afford, afford, you know, high-priced SEO agencies. So that's what I noticed. By the way, our agency is just one year old. Exactly. Today is the day that I bought my domain name, from the domain name agency.
08:24 - Gresham Harkless
One year. Awesome. Yeah.
08:25 - Tessah Aihara
Thank you. So, literally, I started a business during the pandemic because I thought that a lot of people, a lot of business owners were suffering and they didn't have any money to spend on expensive SEO agencies. So I said, I'm just going to offer affordable packages out there. So that's the mission. Then, so when we onboard our clients, our expertise is our content strategy and our digital printhead. That's why we focus. Right. We actually have three, by the way. So the audit, the website calls it, and the setup. Then the next is the content strategy and then the digital pr. Because I believe in SEO, there are only two things, content and pr promotion. Well, we call it link building, but to jazz it out, pr.
09:14 - Gresham Harkless
What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for yourself individually, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart at mix unique?
09:23 - Tessah Aihara
Well, first we kind of like think that we are our target niche. I mean, our target niche is mommy bloggers and small business owners, but we are actually doing it on our own. So like I've told you, my background is building sites. So I learned SEO through that. So when I, every time I onboard a new client, sometimes a lot of, a lot of my clients don't have a website yet, so it's from scratch. I'm not nervous because that's what I've been doing since I learned SEO. So that's, I think that's the secret sauce there because, well, I mean, some people are, of course, they're doing SEO, but they're not personally involved in their niche. So for example, our target niche as well is course creators and I'm also a course creator. Recently, I have started creating my own courses, so I understand the process well. It's often said that we are our own target audience. We are first customers first. So in our agency, we have our in-house projects.
So we don't do stuff that we don't like to be applied to our in-house projects. So we test first on our in-house sites, on our, on our network and then we then, and once we know that it's effective and of course it's, we already know it because we've been doing it for a long time. So that that is the kind of like advantage of the clients we on board. We already have the track record and the experience and it's, and we are experts in our niche and our digital pr, we have been trying to do this because we just started offering digital pr strategy, and the reason why we started offering it because, I mean, it was my pain to find a process or a company that would really produce the result that I want link building wise.
I mean, I've tried everything and I bought links to a lot of vendors and I mean, I, it's not that those vendors suck, but it's just that it's expensive and it's not the quality that we want. So I said, why not just create the offer that we want in-house? So we started honing it and a lot of people are doing HarO right now, but what we are doing is Haro plus premium pr strategy. So it seems that you have a pr powerhouse that is also SEO savvy. So it's kind of like pr specialist, meet SEO specialist kind of thing. I think our clients have been very, very happy with the results because it's not just Harold's link or it's just not link-building. Suddenly. It's like a big media publication that you kind of like. You have a PR, a powerhouse pr publicist in your arsenal because you have us kind of like that. So I think that is one of our unique, unique secret sauces there.
12:05 - Gresham Harkless
I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
12:15 - Tessah Aihara
Okay. I'm a Christian, so I'm a firm believer. One that kind of like, really ten times my performance and really helped me, you know, crush those goals is just installing that Bible up and reading my Bible every, you know, the moment I wake up. It used to be not like that. I mean, I used to open social media the moment I opened my eyes, and it didn't help me, of course. You know, when I started reading the Bible every day, it helped me stay grounded and remember my core values, which I think is important. I mean, Covid taught us a lot of things. I've taught a lot of things about life, and you cannot do everything. You could not be the number one company. You could not beat that agency. I mean, that social media pressures you. But the Bible, the verses would tell you that you got this. I am here. You just got to be happy. Life is short, so it always brings me to those things. When you're happy, you accomplish more. When you're grounded, when you're calm, you're more productive.
13:28 - Gresham Harkless
Appreciate you for sharing that.
13:29 - Tessah Aihara
Awesome.
13:30 - Gresham Harkless
Yes. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around SEO, or it could be, you know, something around business. It's something you might tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
13:45 - Tessah Aihara
Okay, so it's still from the Bible. This is something that I always share with my friends and my family. It's one of my favorite verses, actually. It says that you are equipped for good work. I mean, we business owners, tend to complicate stuff. We focus on those nonessentials. Hey, do I have the perfect website? Hang on a minute. I haven't figured out my branding. Hang on a minute. I need to be on Instagram. I mean, you have to mute that because you are already equipped for good work. Just do it. I mean, just show your genius. A lot of people are waiting for you to show up, and you're already equipped for good work. So you don't need social media, you don't need your perfect logo. You are enough.
14:28 - Gresham Harkless
Truly appreciate that. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Tessa, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:39 - Tessah Aihara
Okay, so a CEO for me is just, you know, I've told you that we are already equipped for good work, right? So as someone who is already equipped for good work. So as a CEO who is equipped for good work, you just need to jump at every opportunity that would be ten times your business. Because when you ten. When you have that mindset, it means that you are also tending the lives of the team members that you have under you.
15:04 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely appreciate that, Sassa, and I appreciate your time as well. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best people can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things you and team are working on.
15:18 - Tessah Aihara
Okay. So I think a lot of people are interested now in learning more about SEO and learning how to or how could we serve them. We have our site, the SEO mama agency. Please go there. We're happy to just chat and collaborate with all of your listeners.
15:39 - Gresham Harkless
Yes, absolutely. The URL for that is going.
15:42 - Tessah Aihara
To be the seomama.com. sorry. Yeah, that's the seomoma.com dot.
15:46 - Gresham Harkless
Okay, perfect. So we'll also have that link and information in the show notes, but just in case anybody's driving or going around, I want to make sure that you're able to kind of access that. But I appreciate you tremendously, you know, for reminding us of, like, how important it is, you know, to build a business and how important it is to understand that failure is part of the journey and it's right in alignment with success and on an even deeper level, just how we can build that foundation within our source and the thing that really will remind us and keep us towards where we ultimately hope to be. So appreciate you so much for all that knowledge and wisdom. Definitely looking forward to the next time, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:20 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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