My Story

It was in 2017 in a small apart­ment in Ham­burg when I decid­ed, for the first time, to build a web­site. I had recent­ly fin­ished my Bach­e­lor in Osnabrück and had just moved to Ham­burg. An acquain­tance had asked me if I could build web­sites and in reck­less exu­ber­ance, I agreed. I had always thought that you could learn every­thing if you are moti­vat­ed enough. Three days lat­er, I had clicked my way through end­less How-To-Youtube videos and cre­at­ed my first web­site with Word­Press. The site looked ter­ri­ble (from today’s per­spec­tive), but I was proud like Oscar. My first own web­site! This feel­ing of hav­ing built some­thing as cool as a web­site by my own hands accord­ing to my ideas made me lick the blood and awak­ened a pas­sion in me that still seems to grow today— the love for the world of online mar­ket­ing. I absorbed the knowl­edge. I could not stop. I spent days, even weeks and months in front of the com­put­er, cre­at­ing blogs, tak­ing video cours­es, read­ing e‑books, writ­ing guest arti­cles and devour­ing books about online mar­ket­ing and its many dif­fer­ent areas and facets. Dur­ing my time in Ham­burg, I start­ed my first job in online mar­ket­ing man­age­ment at Trede GmbH, a sub­sidiary of Heise Regio Ver­lag. In autumn 2017, I went to Sofia, Bul­gar­ia, to get cer­ti­fied as an online mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant by the email mar­ket­ing provider Klick Tipp.

Since my aca­d­e­m­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tions were laid out dif­fer­ent­ly, and I also found the the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tive on online mar­ket­ing excit­ing, I decid­ed to do my Master’s in Online Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Because of its prac­ti­cal rel­e­vance and the cours­es offered dur­ing my stud­ies, I chose the Anhalt Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences. Prac­tice part­ners includ­ed Mer­cedes-Benz AG, WWF, Bauhaus, var­i­ous pub­lic util­i­ties, recruit­ment agen­cies, adver­tis­ing agen­cies etc.

As an already cer­ti­fied online mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant in the field of email mar­ket­ing, I gave lec­tures on email mar­ket­ing, newslet­ters and lead gen­er­a­tion while I was study­ing. Dur­ing this time, I dis­cov­ered a new pas­sion of mine: teach­ing. I start­ed work­ing as a lec­tur­er in adult edu­ca­tion along­side my stud­ies. Lit­tle by lit­tle, I mas­tered new fields of online mar­ket­ing, both for my pri­vate blogs and niche sites, as well as for my cours­es. After 1.5 years, I com­plet­ed my Master’s degree with a grade of 1.3.

The top­ic of my master’s the­sis was: Do Ger­man-speak­ing hid­den cham­pi­ons use the oppor­tu­ni­ties of mar­ket­ing automa­tion? The the­sis deals with the prob­lem of dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion in medi­um-sized enter­pris­es. This top­ic made me win the “Seeds for the Future” schol­ar­ship from Huawei Tech­nolo­gies Co. LTD. in 2019, which includ­ed a trip to Chi­na with vis­its to big tech giants like Ten­cent, Baidu, Aliba­ba, Sina Wei­bo and Nxin. This trip inspired me in a new way for the tech­nolo­gies of the future, like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, Inter­net of Things, autonomous dri­ving etc. Togeth­er with a team, I won the Ideathon 2019 in the TechTem­pel in Bei­jing (Chi­na), and in a sem­i­nar with Chi­na Mar­ket­ing Expert Ash­ley Dudarenok I got many insid­er insights into WeChat and its fea­tures.

Still on this jour­ney, I start­ed to write my first book: How To Sell Big On WeChat — A Guide to the Chi­nese Social Media Chan­nel #1. Since I like to read and teach myself, I dis­cov­ered anoth­er way of knowl­edge trans­fer through writ­ing. More books fol­lowed. Writ­ing, teach­ing and of course, online mar­ket­ing has grabbed me until today, and I have found my mis­sion: To help peo­ple to awak­en their poten­tial. Because any­one enthu­si­as­tic about online mar­ket­ing will dis­cov­er the end­less pos­si­bil­i­ty to real­ize their poten­tial.