About Me

A retired SEO and WordPress expert who remembers what it means to start with nothing.

Quick Summary (If You Are In A Hurry)

My name is Slobodan Dekanic, a free consultant for SEO, WordPress, and copywriting.
I am retired from paid online marketing work after more than 15 years in SEO, WordPress, copywriting, and troubleshooting.
I no longer take on paid client projects and I never receive commission or referral fees when I recommend agencies or experts.
Today, when I am not resting while working in my garden in the countryside, I spend at least 15-20 hours every week giving free, written consulting by email to people anywhere in the world who cannot afford expensive agencies or tools.
I help very small business owners, solo freelancers, students, parents at home, small nonprofits, and anyone who needs my help to understand their situation, diagnose their website and marketing problems, and find simple, honest solutions.
If you write to me in English and describe your problem clearly, I will read your message carefully and reply as soon as I can, usually within about 48 hours on working days, with softer expectations around weekends and busy periods.

If you want to know exactly who I help and how I work today, read “Who I Help And How I Work Today” below.

If you want my full story, start with “How My Life Started Far Away From Online Marketing” and continue from there.

Who I Help And How I Work Today

Who I Help

Today, my main focus is on people who are often ignored by agencies and expensive experts.

I welcome:

Very small local businesses: hair salons, small dental practices, restaurants, mechanics, and all other small businesses that need my help.
Solo freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs who are launching their first real website or starting their own business.
Students, parents at home, and all other people who want to create or repair a website, start a blog, or build a small side project.
Small nonprofits and initiatives that need visitors but do not have the budget for an agency.
Owners of small and medium businesses, and anyone else who has already been disappointed or hurt by agencies or freelancers and now wants an independent, honest second opinion.

In short, anyone worldwide who writes in English and is willing to describe their situation honestly.

What I Actually Do Today

I retired from paid online marketing work in 2017. That means:

I do not sell my time.
I do not run campaigns for money.
I do not take on new paid client projects, whether small or large.

Instead, I use my experience to help people who are now where I once was: with almost no money, a lot of confusion, and no one they can really trust.

Practically, it looks like this:

I spend at least 15-20 hours every week answering emails and helping people.
I help only in written form, by email, in simple English.
Most of the time, I reply within about 48 hours on working days. I usually rest on weekends, but sometimes I still answer if I have time.
All of this help is strictly free.

Even though I stopped taking paid projects in 2017, I still follow major changes in SEO, WordPress, and AI tools, so my advice reflects both long experience and current reality.

Important Boundaries

I am happy to help when:

You are a beginner, solo freelancer, microbusiness owner, student, parent at home, or a small nonprofit.
Your problem is related to:
WordPress (structure, performance, plugins, basic troubleshooting).
SEO and SEvO (Search Everywhere Optimization).
Copywriting and content planning, especially for websites and blogs.
Using AI tools like ChatGPT to support your writing, planning, or research.
You are willing to describe your situation honestly and are ready to take some responsibility for learning and implementation.

I am likely to say no, or to refer you elsewhere, if:

Your question is primarily a legal or compliance issue, or involves regulations where a lawyer or specialized firm is necessary.
Your niche is gambling, adult content, or another area that I do not feel comfortable being involved in.
Your project appears fraudulent, unethical, or connected to criminal activity.
You clearly expect me to do all the work while you refuse to even describe the problem or answer simple questions.
The situation involves very large sums of money and very high responsibility, where a full specialist team is more appropriate than a retired volunteer consultant.

In those cases, I will tell you clearly and politely that I am not the right person to help. If I know a relevant direction, I will suggest that you contact specialized agencies or experts.

I am a free, voluntary consultant. I will do my best for you, but I cannot help everyone, and being honest about that is part of respecting both your time and mine.

How My Life Started Far Away From Online Marketing

People sometimes assume that anyone writing about online marketing has always worked in offices or at least in front of a computer.

My story did not start that way.

I began working on construction sites at 18 years old. For about ten years, my typical day meant:

Hard physical work, in the burning sun in summer and in the freezing cold in winter.
At least six days a week, sometimes seven, with 10-12 hour shifts in dusty, difficult conditions and a constant risk of injury.
Long commutes, early mornings, late nights. Almost no time for private life or friends, and a small salary that was just enough to reach the next paycheck.

At the same time, my personal life was not simple either. My parents lived in the countryside, and I moved to the city for work. I lived in rented apartments, often in poor conditions. By the age of 21, I was living completely on my own and carrying all financial responsibilities myself.

In these circumstances, I became curious about a very simple question:

“Is it possible to make money without destroying your body and health?”

The internet seemed like a potential answer, but the reality was not like today.

My “office” was:

A Pentium 2 computer.
Windows 98 SE.
A slow dial-up connection that made every page load feel like an event.

There were no YouTube tutorials, no beginner-friendly online courses, and certainly no ChatGPT to translate everything into simple language.

If you wanted to learn anything about websites, SEO, or online income, your only real school was online forums.

There were also paper books, but good professional literature was always expensive. I barely managed to buy a few, because most of the time I only had enough money to pay the bills and get through the month.

I spent countless evenings and nights:

Reading long threads for hours, days, and weeks.
Trying to understand conversations between people much more advanced than me.
Asking questions, sometimes posting the same question on several forums at once, and then waiting, sometimes for weeks, for someone to answer.

Every answer I received was a small miracle. A stranger, somewhere on the planet, took time to help me for free. Those moments shaped my view of what “help” really means.

First Online Steps: Forums, Static Sites, And My First 100 Dollars

I was still working on the construction site. The shifts were long, and I came home tired. Even so, I stayed persistent, and in the end it paid off.

After work, I could manage only two to three hours a day for reading, learning, and testing what I had learned. I did not have much free time, but I had a clear goal: I wanted to change my life and start earning money online.

After almost two years of reading, testing, and failing, something finally changed.

I learned to make simple static websites in Microsoft FrontPage, a tool that no longer exists and is probably forgotten by most people. I had Microsoft Office installed on my computer, and because FrontPage felt very similar to Microsoft Word, it seemed like the easiest way to start learning how to build websites.

In 2003, I began creating simple static sites with FrontPage, running everything locally in XAMPP. That was the year when WordPress version 0.7 was released, but at the time I did not pay much attention to it.

A friend saw one of the sites I had created on my computer and suggested to his father that we build a website for their travel agency. Together, my friend and I wrote the texts for the site and chose suitable, attractive photos for the travel packages he and his father were selling. After about a month, the site was ready.

It was a nice site, and both of us were very proud of what we had created. A few years later, we moved that site to WordPress, but that is a different story.

For that project, my friend’s father gave me 100 US dollars. That was the first money I earned on the internet for building a website.

To many people, 100 dollars is nothing special.

To me, at that moment, it meant everything. It was proof that:

I could earn money with my brain, not only with my hands and my back.
The time spent on forums, the nights on slow dial-up, and the experiments were not a waste.
There was a realistic path out of the construction site life.

From there, I did not jump into luxury or instant success. I slowly shifted:

A bit less time on construction, a bit more time on web projects.
More learning, more mistakes, more small wins.
A gradual transition from “physical worker who reads forums at night” to “someone who lives from internet work”.

From Static Websites To SEO: My First Optimization Projects

That period was also when I became interested in SEO. It felt like a great discovery to learn that you could influence Google to show a page at the top of the results for certain keywords.

I realized this work was more creative than simply building static sites. It meant I could not only create websites, but also help those sites be found by the right people. I began offering SEO optimization for the sites I built.

At that time, SEO in Serbia was very new. I believe I was among the first small group of people in the country who worked on it seriously. Things were much simpler than they are today. Very few people understood why Google put some pages at the top of the results while other sites could not be found at all, even if you typed the domain name directly into the search.

Back then, SEO could be almost shockingly simple. To rank above a competitor, it was often enough to repeat the main keyword more times on your page. If a competing site used the main keyword 20 times in the content, and you used it 25 times, your page could end up higher. It sounds unbelievable now, but it was true.

Word spread quickly that I was doing this kind of work, and many people began to contact me to help them with their sites. Those were good, simple times.

From Static Sites To WordPress: A New Way Of Building Websites

Around 2005, I began paying serious attention to WordPress. I was working on SEO for a site, and a PHP developer friend on that project said something like: “Why do you not start creating sites with WordPress? It is much easier to create and update sites than with static pages.” His comment stayed with me.

In 2005, WordPress introduced page creation in a way that made it more than just a blogging platform. From that moment, for me, it stopped being “only for blogs” and became a practical system for building sites that matched the structure my clients needed at that time. From then on, I decided to use a CMS for every new site, and in practice that usually meant WordPress.

Many of the clients for whom I had originally built static websites, and for whom I handled SEO and occasional small changes, I later encouraged to move their sites to WordPress.

For my regular clients, I often did the migration from static HTML to WordPress for free, or for a symbolic amount of money. To be honest, I did it largely for myself. My work became much easier when everything was in WordPress. Updates were faster, changes were safer, and I no longer had to track multiple copies of static files and worry about every manual edit.

Over time, WordPress became more and more popular and started to replace other content management systems. A large community formed around it, and an impressive number of free plugins and themes appeared and kept growing.

By around 2011 and 2012, WordPress had effectively become the dominant CMS in my daily work. Almost no one contacted me about SEO or website development for anything other than a WordPress site. During that period, I even moved several sites from Joomla to WordPress, simply because that was what clients wanted. Joomla felt complicated to them.

WordPress felt like a simple tool, easy to learn, and very friendly for SEO optimization.

Two Decades In Online Marketing: Responsibility And Results

Over time, I moved from being the person asking beginner questions on forums to the person people asked for help.

I spent more than 15 years living inside:

Search engine optimization (SEO) for different niches.
WordPress development, maintenance, performance optimization, and troubleshooting.
Copywriting for websites, landing pages, and campaigns.
The psychology of how visitors read, decide, and act.
Practical experiments with automation and later with AI tools as they became available.

I worked with:

Small startups trying to get their first customers.
Personal brands and professionals who needed their site to reflect their real expertise.
Medium-sized and larger organizations with serious marketing budgets and strong financial targets.

My work was not limited to one country. I did projects in Serbia and in many other places in the world, including the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Turkey, Australia. International projects were almost always in English, while local projects in Serbia were in the Serbian language.

Across all those years, a few things remained constant:

I took problems seriously, whether they were “small” or “big”.
I preferred to understand the entire system instead of just one button.
I was willing to do the hard, manual diagnostic work when there were no tools yet.

Some facts from that time:

I helped more than 300 businesses improve their online presence and results.
I improved or rescued over 500 WordPress sites, dealing with:
Slow loading times.
Heavy, outdated themes.
Conflicting plugins.
Poor information architecture.
Weak or confusing content.
I led or participated in over 100 website redesigns, making sure design, content, and user experience matched real business goals instead of just looking pretty.

In terms of results, my work contributed to projects where:

A client turned an investment of approximately €1.3 million into around €2.5 million net profit within two years.
Sites that were badly hit by search algorithm changes recovered, with organic daily visits increasing by 200-500 percent or more within four to five months.
Focused SEO and content work increased organic traffic by around 300 percent in just a few months.

I list these numbers not as trophies, but as context.

They show that I have been responsible for situations where mistakes were expensive and invisible problems could quietly kill a business. That experience is what now allows me to look at a “small” website and quickly see what really matters.

Why I Stepped Away From Paid Work

After many years in this world, something became clear.

I had accumulated:

A large amount of practical knowledge.
Many difficult projects and long hours.
A sense that life is not only about the next campaign, the next launch, or the next set of KPIs.

At the same time, the stress and responsibility of constantly managing big expectations began to feel like a weight I no longer wanted to carry in the same way.

For a period of time, I was earning good money. I was young, I enjoyed my work, and I liked the feeling that I could live well by doing something I genuinely cared about.

But the price was high. The stress was constant, and there was very little space left for my own life. I was too dedicated to my work and to solving clients’ problems. Weekends and holidays disappeared. It stopped mattering whether it was day or night.

I often worked 12, 14, sometimes 16 hours in a row. There were days when I did not leave the house at all. I turned off my phone, prepared excuses in advance for friends who invited me to meet, and shut out almost everything that was not related to work.

My focus narrowed to three things: my clients, their problems, and the growing numbers in my bank account. Before I even opened my eyes in the morning, my mind was already on a client issue: what I should try next, what I might have missed.

Somewhere along the way, I lost myself in that story. My life revolved around work, clients, and money, and it no longer felt like my life.

I see this pattern in many people today. They work incredibly hard, burn themselves out, and then ask why nothing truly changes. Why they are not happy. Why they are not satisfied.

They may have money. They may even like the work itself. But they still cannot feel at peace. In many cases, the problem is not the work. The problem is the lack of a clear and honest sense of purpose.

So in 2017, I made a deliberate choice.

I decided to step away from paid online marketing work and to redesign my life.

My Life Today: Countryside, Simpler Living, And A New Purpose

After many years in the city, I moved back to an old family house in the countryside. I live modestly, but I have everything I need. I am satisfied with my life, and it feels like my life belongs to me again.

Because of everything I have been through, I often say:

“I want everyone to have as much money as possible, so that they can see for themselves that happiness is not in money.”

Today, I am far from stress, far from the noise and rush of the city. Far from tight deadlines, from juggling several projects at once, and from many of the things that never suited me in the first place.

When I am not helping people with their sites and marketing questions, I spend much of my time working in the garden, growing healthy food for myself.

Why I Work For Free Now

There are two deep reasons why I now help for free.

Reason one: gratitude and memory.

I know from personal experience what it feels like to be:

Exhausted after a long workday.
Poor, counting every coin.
Confused and overwhelmed by things you do not understand.
Alone with your browser and your questions.

If the people on those forums had not answered my questions for free, if they had not taken me seriously as a beginner, I would not have left the construction site, and you would not be reading this page.

Working for free now is my way to continue that chain of generosity.

Reason two: protecting beginners from being abused.

During my active years in paid online marketing work, several things left a strong impression on me:

I sometimes worked many hours on diagnostics, discovering exactly what was wrong on a site, documenting the problem in detail, and outlining clearly how to solve it. In a few cases, once clients understood the problem and the solution from my report, they simply disappeared and did not pay for the work already done.
I saw people who knew almost nothing about websites being charged many times more than necessary for simple tasks, just because they did not understand the terminology or the true size of the problem.

I do not want to be part of that system.

Today, when someone writes to me:

I invest my time to diagnose the real problem.
I explain in plain language what is going on and how big or small the issue really is.
I outline realistic options: what they can do themselves, what someone else would need to do, and what a fair scope and price range might look like.

If they need help implementing the solution, I often recommend friends and experts I trust.

As I explained earlier, I do not receive any commission, referral fee, or hidden benefit when I send someone to my friends. I am not part of any affiliate program, and I do not sell leads. I recommend people because I care about what happens to the person after we finish our email conversation.

I would not feel I had truly helped if:

I diagnosed the problem.
I showed the path.
And then I left the person in the hands of someone who would exaggerate the work and charge them far more than it is worth.

I prefer to sleep well at night.

How To Get Help From Me (Step By Step)

You might be wondering what it actually looks like to get help from me.

It is simple, but not superficial.

Step 1. You write to me in English

You write to me by email, in English. You explain who you are, what your site or project is about, and what you are trying to achieve. You describe the problem clearly and concretely, but you keep it compact enough that I can read it without spending an hour just on your email.

On my Contact page, you will find more detailed instructions and a simple structure you can follow when you write to me. If you follow that structure, it will be much easier for me to respond quickly and precisely.

To make it easier for me to help you, and to increase the chance that you will receive a clear and useful answer, please:

Tell me briefly who you are and what your site or project is about.
Explain what you want to achieve, not only which button you clicked.
Describe your problem as clearly and concretely as you can, but keep it reasonably concise so that I can read and understand it in one sitting.
Mention what you have already tried and what happened.

Step 2. I read carefully and sometimes ask questions

I visit your site when relevant. I try to understand the context: your goals, your constraints, what you have tried so far. If something is unclear, I send you a few short questions.

Step 3. I diagnose the real problem

Based on my experience with WordPress, SEO, copywriting, psychology, and tools like ChatGPT, I look for what is really going on. Sometimes it is a technical issue. Sometimes it is about structure. Sometimes it is about content, messaging, or completely unrealistic expectations set by others.

Step 4. I explain everything in plain language

I write back with a clear explanation that even a complete beginner can understand. I avoid jargon as much as possible. I focus on the elements that truly matter for your situation.

Step 5. We decide on the best path for you

Usually, one of three things happens:

DIY path: The problem is small or moderate, and you are willing to learn. I give you step by step guidance and often link to blog posts on my site where I already covered the topic for beginners.
Hire anyone path: You want to pay someone to do the work, but you do not want to be fooled. You use my explanation and outline as a map. It becomes much harder for anyone to exaggerate the work or the price.
Trusted referral path: You would like to work with someone I personally trust. I give you the contact of an expert or agency who knows my standards and understands that most people I send are beginners with limited budgets.

In more than 50 percent of cases, people choose to contact the experts I recommend and mention my name. This often results in better treatment and more reasonable pricing, because my friends know that:

I already did part of the diagnostic work.
The scope of the problem is clear.
They are dealing with someone who might otherwise be lost or taken advantage of.

All of this happens via email only. No calls, no video meetings, no complicated scheduling. Just written messages, one human to another.

A Human Invitation To Reach Out

I am not a guru, and I am not a brand.

I am an ordinary person who:

Spent ten years on construction sites.
Lived in poor conditions in rented apartments.
Started learning about online work on a slow dial-up connection with a Pentium 2 and Windows 98 SE.
Spent more than 15 years inside websites, marketing campaigns, and SEO projects, including situations where a lot of money depended on doing things right.
Decided to retire from the world of paid online marketing work in 2017.
Chose to use my experience to help beginners, for free, as long as I have the energy and time to do it.

If you are:

Tired from your day job,
Worried about money,
Confused by all the “expert advice” that assumes you have a big budget and a team,

you are exactly the kind of person I had in mind when I decided to do this.

Today you live in a world that is dramatically easier than the one I started in:

Fast internet.
YouTube full of tutorials.
Free courses.
AI tools like ChatGPT that can answer questions in seconds.

This does not mean that your life is easy, but it does mean you have more tools than I ever had in my early years.

You do not have to know everything.
You do not have to pretend.
You do not have to walk alone through the noise.

If you are stuck, afraid of making a mistake, or simply do not know what to do next with your WordPress site, your SEO, or your content, you can write to me.

Describe your situation the best you can.
If I do not understand something, I will ask you a few more questions.
If I can help, I will do my best.
If I cannot, I will tell you honestly and, if possible, point you toward someone who can.

That is all I offer.
And sometimes, that is enough to change the direction of a project, or of a life.