About me — Onur Şendere, blogger and writer

Hello!

I’m Onur. I graduated from Ortaklar Anatolian Teacher Training High School in Aydın and from Turkish Language Teaching at the Faculty of Education, Gazi University. Even so, I only taught for a few years, and only in the private sector.

The copywriting I started at university led me to SEO once it also meant writing texts that Google would like more. And when I wanted to publish those texts somewhere tidy, I discovered WordPress. Then social media arrived. Once the job was no longer just writing but also taking photos and shooting videos, all of that had to be edited and shared in an engaging way, and that is how I got into social media management. Later, I took the web design, copywriting and SEO work I had been doing as a freelancer into various agencies.

I started this blog in 2007, while I was at university, under the name Yobiil. At one point I did something called “Free Hugs”. When it got me onto the radio, I noticed that people only understood the blog’s name after I had repeated it several times. So in 2008 I changed it: rather than bother coming up with a new name, I simply gave it my own. :)

I’ve done other kinds of work too. On a Work & Travel programme in the USA, for instance, I found myself working at McDonald’s for a few months. Living on nothing but fast food, I put on six kilos in a month and lost myself along the way. During my university years I also worked at Marks & Spencer for a while. There I had the chance to meet many diplomats, artists and academics, and I learnt a little more about life.

When university ended, I went back to Söke. On the strength of my blog posts, I started working remotely, first as an editor at Tamindir.com and soon afterwards as one of the founding editors of SosyalMedya.co. Then military service put all of that on hold.

After my military service, I moved to İzmir to keep working at Tamindir.com. Some time later I left and founded mobil13. Just a month after launch, I had the thrill of seeing the content we published read tens of thousands of times.

Then came an offer from a private school about to open in Söke. I could never have turned down an offer that involved teaching. I accepted, and started both teaching and running the school’s digital marketing. Even so, it was sad to see how different teaching in the private sector is for someone shaped by Ortaklar Anatolian Teacher Training High School and Gazi’s Faculty of Education.

In 2015 I got married and we moved to Kuşadası. I carried on freelancing for a while longer.

In 2019 my wife and I moved to London on a kind of entrepreneur visa known as the Ankara Agreement. Under the Digiwings brand, I built websites for businesses, managed their social media accounts and helped them stand out on Google with SEO and local SEO. After a year, when the UK gave my business a “well done, keep it up” approval, we stayed on. But living in London no longer felt like a good idea: COVID-19 had arrived and we were expecting a baby. London isn’t exactly an ideal city to start a family in either. If you’re wondering why, just ask Google or an AI tool.

In 2020 we moved to Shrewsbury, and we still live here. Our son, Atlas Ediz, joined us; he has grown up and has even started school.

I write the blog in Turkish. You will find step-by-step technology guides, book, film and TV series reviews, essays on Turkish language and literature, and notes on everyday life. All posts are listed by year in the archive (in Turkish), and you can read a selection in English on this page.

If you’d like to get in touch, you can email me at iletisim @ onursendere.com or use the contact form (in Turkish). :)

You can also follow me here: