Meet Common Grounds Member - Donna Blackwood from Ground Zero Digital
Donna is an expertise in business search marketing (SEO), lives on the Mornington Peninsula of Melbourne. She is a Foodie/wine lover, and enjoys pilates, reading, singing, live bands, and long beach walks.
Jo Stevens really enjoyed chatting with Donna and would love for you to take the time to listen to her story.
Learn more about Donna
Hi, I’m Donna, I am a co-founder of a digital marketing company, Ground Zero Digital here by the beach on the Mornington Peninsula of Melbourne. I’m a mum and my partner Mark is an IT Project Manager. I’m over 50, I’m a woman in a digital technology role, and I’m Neurodivergent. (To be honest, most tech people are neurodivergent.)
I started my self-employment journey due to boredom in the same environment, with the same people year on year. I needed to be busy, challenged. I need to be mistress of my own time & workload, it’s how my brain works.
My business and marketing background goes back to pre-websites, pre-Google!.
I was a contractor throughout my twenties, I worked in database design, training, professional services & HR recruitment. I also owned a wholesale industrial components business which built up to $2M in turnover annually. I have accumulated a lengthy list of industries I was able to gain experience in, which has allowed me to have insight into a range of clients
businesses because I have direct experience plus a whole lot of life experience.
In 2020 I co-founded Ground Zero Digital.
We are a trio of freelancers that came together to combine our strengths and offer something better in the digital marketing space. My area of expertise in the business is search marketing (SEO).
One of the co-founders, Shanon has extensive experience in graphic design, motion graphics (she was offered a role with Pixar that she turned down!) Shanon is our lead designer and develops awesome functional lead generation websites.
Supporting our clients with their SEO and website backend, we realised there was a huge gap in the market to provide cost-effective SEO, and thanks to our co-founder No 2, we are pretty excited to have developed our own software thanks to the super nerd-brain of Dane, who is an integration developer & technology consultant.
Our software platform LaunchSEO.io is built on artificial intelligence. This AI generated SEO platform is for small businesses to manage their own SEO (with support available). It provides free SEO training modules, free website audits and if you can log into your website backend, you can follow the monthly actions.
My goal is to continue to help businesses scale up and be productive and to build a recurring income through the provision of services which will allow me to focus more time on building new products and services that small business needs.
Recently I had a conversation with my partner Mark, he asked “What does retirement look like for you?”
I realised I had no plan to retire, not completely. I can’t imagine doing anything. I’d go bonkers!
Between us, we have decided we will volunteer to help people build skills to get into the workforce or to just give them an interest and purpose. We both like to teach, so I’m sure it will evolve into something that is based on the needs of low-income, unemployed, people recovering from life’s challenges and needing to build confidence.
If you would like to connect or learn more about my business, you can follow me on LinkedIn or Facebook.