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Hi, I’m Ilana Wechsler, a former data analyst turned Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing expert.

I discovered the world of PPC about 10 years ago when I left the corporate world as a data analyst.

Funny, I’m actually not the usual sob story of someone who hated their job and always dreamt of being an entrepreneur – *yawn* (I swear, I’m VERY different to those ‘other’ Internet Marketers with their never-ending ‘rags to riches’ stories).

Truth is, I actually loved my job and had a very successful career working for some of the biggest names in the Finance industry. If you are interested, you can check out my LinkedIn profile here.

But my life took an abrupt left turn one day whilst I was on maternity leave.

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To cut a long story short, I was in the final stages of pregnancy (with my first child) when I had a sudden (and very serious) pregnancy related complication. This resulted in me having my baby early.

As you can probably imagine, this came as a massive shock.

If you’ve ever had a close call with a medical issue, you will know that it changes you, fundamentally.

So, whilst I had every intention of going back to my corporate career, I now had a new perspective on life. Not to mention that I had also fallen hopelessly in love with my son – I couldn’t bear the thought of only seeing him on week-ends.

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It was then that I committed myself to finding a path that I could give me flexible working hours whilst also having a successful career.

Since I had always worked in corporate, I had NO idea what I was going to do.

I sat back and thought about what my skills were…

Since my job as a data analyst meant that I lived in a spreadsheet, I thought I could possibly help people build complicated spreadsheets (and I could also work from home).

This was my first venture.

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I put an ad on Gumtree (Australian version of Craigslist) advertising my superior excel skills (they were pretty good after spending 10 years in them) and to my surprise, companies responded to it!

Voila, I now have a business! Or so I thought 🙂

In order to look more professional, I bought the domain name excelhelp.com.au and built my own website.

You can see the first version here – bear in mind, I was a data analyst, NOT a web designer!:

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To my surprise, no one could find it online and as a result, it received zero traffic.

This sparked my obsession with website traffic and I quickly discovered the world of Pay Per Click marketing. Little did I know this would end up being the perfect fit for my skills as a data analyst.

I quickly fell under the spell of PPC, abandoned my Excel Help business, and decided to start a dedicated PPC agency.

I soon became even more enthusiastic when I saw the results I was getting my clients!

Fast forward 10 years (and 3 kids later!), I have run a dedicated PPC agency for over 7 years and managed well over $30 millions of dollars on behalf of clients.

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You could say that in that time, I learnt a thing or two about paid traffic, offers, funnels etc. In fact, in that time, I think I’ve worked in every possible niche out there – as well as many weird and wonderful ones.

Now, I still have my agency, but I’ve committed myself to passing on the knowledge I’ve learned in my agency, especially what is working right now.

I am also fortunate enough to be invited to speak at a number of high level conferences, such as Social Media Marketing World (San Diego), Sellers Summit (Miami), Ontrapalooza (Santa Barbara), SuperFastBusiness (Sydney), DMSS (Bali) etc.

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I guess you could say that Pay per Click is a bit like another ‘baby’ —I’m a bit obsessed!

When I’m not helping people get amazing results from their PPC campaigns, I enjoy family time with my kids in Sydney Australia.

I wish I could say we take long walks on the beach, but the truth is ‘family time’ mainly consists of running between soccer practice and kids dance classes, as any fellow parent will know.

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