Moving to Cyprus as a GEO Freelancer: Does It Work?

Moving to Cyprus and starting over as a freelancer: that is what I talked about with Melina Alexandra Dykczak, right in the middle of her fresh start. Melina worked in a hospital for eight years, in the cardiac catheterization lab. Today she builds websites for B2B clients that are designed for GEO performance, and she lives in Cyprus. She herself calls her first self-employment a failure. That is exactly what we talked about, and about a lot of what came after.

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From the Cath Lab to Self-Employment

Melina trained as a medical assistant, then did further training as a "Fachwirt" (a German advanced qualification) and worked in the cardiac catheterization lab. That meant being in the OR, implanting pacemakers, and covering emergency duty for heart attacks. According to Melina, technology was always part of the job, because an incredible number of technical devices were in daily use. She knew at the age of six that she wanted to work in a hospital. Originally she wanted to study medicine.

The change came right after Covid. Melina wanted to take on responsibility, things in the clinic and the team were getting harder, and she started looking at other positions. In her view another clinic would not have changed much. Then her boyfriend emigrated to Cyprus and told her to come along and take a look. She spent two months there, liked it, and still started her self-employment in Germany first. For a while both ran in parallel:

"50 percent in the hospital, 50 percent self-employment. Spoiler, it's not great."

Her advice from that: at some point you should decide.

The First Business: Why Medical Illustrations Did Not Work

Melina has a talent for drawing. Her idea was to sell medical illustrations for publications and studies. She landed one job, and that was it. Her explanation is an honest one:

"I just wanted to create something beautiful and thought, come on, I'll make money with this."

On top of that came a gap many people from other professions know. In training as a medical assistant you learn the opposite of marketing, according to Melina. Because of the German law on advertising for medical products and services, you may not even recommend a specific cardiologist to a patient. Marketing was a completely new field for her.

As a stopgap she saw on LinkedIn that simpleclub was looking for freelancers for medical content. She applied but was not hired as a content writer. Instead she was to review the content and create exam material, for one year. She enjoyed it until the project ended.

The illustration project still led somewhere. Melina set up a Shopify shop and noticed that she enjoyed the design work: choosing colors, designing a logo. Her boyfriend suggested Webflow. She first said no, then created an account anyway. At the turn of 2023 to 2024 she landed her first real client job in web design, through a partner company of her boyfriend. Her words for it: "Vitamin B."

Selling Is Not Manipulation

What helped her get from drawing to selling? Melina joined a community around a program called Launch Rockstars. There you learn to define and sell your offer, and you meet like-minded people. She underestimated the second part at first:

"Before, I had 20, 30 colleagues I worked with every day. And suddenly you're at zero. You sit at home alone."

What helped most was the mindset. She used to think selling was manipulation. Today she sees it like this:

"My view of selling today is simple: I have a solution for a certain problem. And I can help you with it if you want. Or not."

She is not pushy when selling, because forcing something on someone who will not enjoy it in the end gets her nothing. She sees her job as explaining why the offer is the right one for that person. With the medical illustrations that was missing, by her own account she was not fully behind it.

I asked how she explains the problem to clients without giving every one of them a free webinar on GEO. I know that from my own work as a freelancer, I have to sell too. By the way, Melina does not promise that a better website brings more customers. Between lead and customer there is always another person who might mess things up.

GEO Starts with the Basics of the Website

A prospect recently told Melina he was interested in AI visibility and wanted to be visible there. She looked at his site and said that was possible, but the basics had to come first.

"A page that is used as a business card or, as I always say, an alibi website, leads to nothing."

Her test against being blind to your own business: go to your own site and pretend to be a customer. Read the first section, look at the first image. From a customer's view, do you understand what the offer is and who it is for? Often it already fails there. Add animations that overload and pop-ups, which she hates. Anyone who closes the page because of that becomes neither a lead nor a customer.

"If your page itself has problems, we don't need to work on AI visibility."

Melina counts the following as basics:

• Target group and customer language: Does the wording fit, are the pain points addressed?
• Page structure: Conversion-optimized pages follow an order that differs by industry. You build an event page differently from a coaching page. First comes the question "Is this for me?", then prejudices and bad experiences, worked through by importance.
• Curiosity from section to section: Every section should make people curious about the next one. Ending a section abruptly loses the reader.
• Small giveaways: A PDF at the end of the page that lets you win leads once more.
• Technology and typical SEO topics: This includes alt texts and accessibility. According to Melina, roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people in Germany rely on screen readers. Leaving images without alt text excludes a large audience, and your customer could be someone who uses a screen reader.

I think this order is right. GEO is the addition that builds on a page that already explains its offer clearly.

Self-Taught: Webflow University and a Webinar a Week

Melina taught herself most of it. She worked through the whole Webflow University, which now offers badges you get after passing a test. She received a web design course as a gift but did not finish it because it covers so much material. For beginners with no prior knowledge she considers it good. On top of that came YouTube and learning by doing.

She became self-employed at the end of 2022. That is about four years now, and she still has not finished learning. For everything around GEO she sits in at least one webinar every week. These are webinars from various US companies, for example from OpenAI on ChatGPT ads, from Webflow with well-known SEO people, and she thinks one with Riverside as well. Her SEO console is currently SE Ranking, which brings further invitations.

Claude in Daily Work: Mockups and a LinkedIn Outreach Bot

I wanted to know how far she has automated with AI. Her answer: very close to it. She now makes her mockups entirely with Claude. She has stored her own design guide in Claude, feeds in the data of the current site, and Claude knows how she wants the website.

She also built a LinkedIn outreach bot. It works like this:

• Every day it goes through her last three posts and checks who reacted.
• It looks at the profiles and checks whether the person belongs to her target group.
• It runs through three signals that Melina defined. Only if everything is a yes does it suggest a casual message.
• It works in her logged-in browser, so Claude has to be open.

Melina dislikes typical fake networking and writes accordingly relaxed: "Hey, I saw you liked my GEO post. If you have questions, you know where to find me." Whether the bot is really worth it for outreach, she is still watching. She cannot message someone every day just because they liked her posts on two days, and she built in safeguards for that. Reactions have been friendly so far, and some people asked real questions, which she answers directly in the chat or moves into a call.

I found her view on whether AI saves her time honest. On one hand AI takes a lot off her plate. On the other hand she keeps trying new things, and that eats time again. Right now it is give and take. There is no shortcut on input either:

"I can't just say, do the emails. I have to predefine the skills, I have to predefine the order. You have to go into a lot of detail, otherwise you get mediocre results."

With tools she aims for as little switching as possible. Right now much of it runs only in Claude. There is now an interface between her SEO console and Claude, which she wants to try soon. Fewer open tabs, fewer interfaces, everything in one central place. That matches my experience. Melina writes critically about AI-generated websites, and her frustration is aimed at people who have no idea and say they no longer need a web designer.

Moving to Cyprus: Paperwork, Taxes, Costs, Safety Net

The official move was in February 2025. Melina closed her small business in Germany to make a clean break. Some entrepreneurs who keep a GmbH in Germany are subject to exit taxation. With her income that probably would not have been an issue, but it can get expensive. After that she went back into employment for a year and did Webflow web design full time there. A few months ago she became self-employed again in Cyprus.

The fear was big: a new country, unfamiliar rules, maybe it works, maybe it does not. So she wanted to test carefully. Her clients react positively. Some imagine she is at the beach every morning:

"Which is not true. I work all day."

She gladly admits that a lunch break in the pool is possible. Negative feedback comes rather from LinkedIn messages that criticize her for listing Cyprus in her profile.

How she set herself up:

• She is registered in Cyprus as a sole trader, under her own name, with a VAT ID, so she can handle clients from Germany under the reverse-charge procedure.
• She still wants to set up a limited company. Critics name the place of jurisdiction as a problem. That is why her contracts always say German jurisdiction.
• Her clients are small and mid-sized companies. Large corporations take too long for her, with ever more rounds and escalation levels. One SME client wrote to her on LinkedIn in the evening, they had the meeting on the next working day, and on Monday they started.
• She handles taxes and social security herself, all online: the monthly VAT filing and the social security contributions each quarter.

She did the registration without an agency, and her advice on that is clear. She had to hand in documents in Greek, and Claude filled them in for her. You should think about which data you give an AI, in her case the tax number. She still walked to the authorities herself, and the staff were confused, because normally an agency does it. Her conclusion:

"I'll be honest: take the 5,000 euros and have it done."

She has one practical tip for anyone interested: move at the turn of the year, then you do not have to file a tax return for just a few months. And cut as much as possible in Germany, no car, no company, no apartment.

Life in Cyprus: What Is Better and What Is Not

Melina likes to tell what she values there: less politics in everyday life, more focus on yourself, swimming in the lunch break, eating out more often, tomatoes for 50 cents a kilo at the farmers market. She has learned golf and padel and can take a boat out during the week. On Mount Olympus, which is around 2,000 meters high, it snows in winter, and down below you can in theory swim on the same day.

She also says what is more expensive or harder. Imported products cost more, she once saw 125 grams of blueberries for 9 euros. Rents are rising, electricity is expensive, and in the rainy season water presses through the windows. For health insurance she paid a little over 200 euros for September and expects around 600 euros per quarter. In Germany she previously had private insurance at 500 euros a month. Care locally is good for many people, but as a former clinic professional she expects more, and for important matters she goes to a doctor in Germany.

Recommending Cyprus is hard for her, with a wink, because the roads are getting fuller. Her advice: it is worth a look, but it is southern Europe and works differently from Germany.

The A Door and the B Door

My favorite moment of the episode was Melina's image for decisions. A decisions are doors that close behind you. With B decisions you can go back if you do not like the room.

"Most decisions in life are B doors, but we treat them as if they were A doors."

Her conclusion: try it. If it does not work, you can go back to Germany or into a permanent job. Her mother saying "Just do it" and friends offering her a couch gave her the backing she needed.

On the state of her second attempt she says: considering that she is only just starting again, it is going quite well, and there is always room to improve. She underestimated the 80-20 principle:

"20 percent is really my current work, what I like. And 80 percent is everything around it."

Social security, authorities, phone calls, bookkeeping, LinkedIn posts. Her wish is an AI agent that takes over the administrative part completely.

Her closing tip to everyone who is starting out or further along:

"Accept every bit of help. At some point the moment comes when you can give it back."

My Personal Key Takeaways

• A career change needs a focus. 50 percent hospital and 50 percent self-employment was not a long-term solution for Melina.
• A failed first business gives you material. The Shopify shop for the illustration idea became the entry into web design with Webflow.
• Selling means offering a solution. If you solve a problem and can explain it, you need no pressure.
• A community helps with mindset. If you come from a team, you notice at the kitchen table how alone you are.
• Basics first, then GEO. A clear offer, structure, technology and accessibility come before AI visibility.
• AI takes detailed work. An agent only delivers good results once skills and order are clearly defined.
• Plan early when moving abroad. Clarify the turn of the year, jurisdiction, VAT ID and what data you share with AI beforehand.
• Most decisions are B doors. Fear should not be the reason to skip trying.
• Accept help. You can give back later.

Conclusion

Melina shows what a fresh start looks like when it is not finished yet: a failed first business, a change with a detour through employment, a lot of self-study and a daily routine with more administration than you expect. What I liked most is how clearly she places GEO. First the website has to do its job, then you can talk about visibility in AI answers.

If you are thinking about moving to Cyprus, the episode gives you an honest first-hand account: from registering as a sole trader to taxes, health insurance and everyday costs.

If you are wondering whether your website covers the basics before you work on GEO, listen to the episode. And if you are looking for support with SEO and GEO, get in touch.

You can reach Melina on LinkedIn, where her email address is also visible.

FAQ

How did Melina get from the hospital into web design? She worked in a hospital for eight years, most recently in the cardiac catheterization lab. Her first self-employment with medical illustrations did not work. Through a Shopify shop she got to Webflow, and at the turn of 2023 to 2024 she had her first client job in web design, arranged through a partner company of her boyfriend.

Why did Melina's first business fail? She says herself that she mainly wanted to draw and create something beautiful, and thought she would make money that way. She was not fully behind it. On top of that, her training had taught her nothing about marketing.

What are the basics before you work on GEO? A page whose offer and target group are clear in the first section, a structure that follows visitors' questions of trust, and clean technology including alt texts and accessibility. According to Melina, pop-ups and overloaded animations drive visitors away.

How does Melina use AI in her daily work? She creates mockups with Claude based on her own design guide and built a LinkedIn outreach bot that checks reactions to her last three posts and suggests messages. Both need a lot of preparation, such as predefined skills and a fixed order.

How do you become self-employed after moving to Cyprus? Melina is registered as a sole trader in her own name, with a VAT ID, so she can invoice clients in Germany under the reverse charge procedure. She handles the monthly VAT return and the quarterly social insurance contributions herself online. She still plans to set up a limited company.

What does Melina advise people who want to move to Cyprus? Move at the turn of the year, cut as much as possible in Germany, and have someone with experience handle the registration as a self-employed person. She did everything herself and would put around 5,000 euros into a service provider for it. Her guiding thought: most decisions are B doors, you can go back.

Listen to the episode: Moving to Cyprus as a GEO Freelancer: Does It Work? | with Melina Dykczak