The Learn Digital Marketing app is the fastest way to learn the basics of marketing.
There, I said it. But it’s true, so I get to say it.
You can become a very solid digital marketer in just a few months, but you will need to be focused.
And also, you will a solid plan.
Let’s go ahead and make you such a plan!
Choose an initial focus (probably traffic)
There are three main aspects to online marketing:
- Traffic
- Retention
- Conversion
Each of them is further divided into many smaller parts, but these are the fundamental building blocks.
They are traditionally viewed as a sequence, and even though that model has been somewhat challenged lately, it still holds and is a valid yet simple way of thinking about pretty much any digital marketing strategy.
The best way to go about it is to start by learning as much about traffic as possible. There is no better starting point.
Why?
Well, without getting attention and users to your brand or product, retention and conversion are useless. No matter how good your product is, or how slick your website design is, or how good the balance of fun and value is of your emails, if you don’t have eyeballs on your brand, you can’t materialize any of those.
Of course, it’s pretty much vital to figure out both retention and conversion as soon as possible. You definitely want to become a well-rounded marketer as fast as you can, one that can immediately bring results for themselves and clients.
But only after getting at least somewhat good at getting traffic.
And the good news about learning traffic first is that you can still see some results if you’re good just at getting traffic and suck at the other aspects, while the opposite is not true.
Most common traffic methods
The most common traffic methods are:
- Blogging and SEO (usually with Email marketing included, but that can be sometimes separated as well)
- Social media and communities, possibly mixed with paid advertising
- Video marketing
- Podcasting
- Paid advertising
- Platform traffic (app stores)
You can go any way about this you want.
But the classic, evergreen method for decades now has been blogging and search engine optimization.
It is the method I recommend to most people to start with.
Not because it’s easy. Oh, no, no, it’s not easy at all.
But it certainly pays off the most, especially in the medium to long term.
It involves a lot of writing, testing, learning, measuring, and editing. And I’ll be the first one to admit it – some of those suck (especially editing).
Even worse, it takes quite a lot of time for results to start becoming visible. In fact, that’s the biggest weakness of blogging, and there’s pretty much no way to go around it, especially for newer blogs.
But at the same time, it’s also the most powerful method.
Billions of people read blogs every day.
It requires almost no upfront financial investment.
Anyone can do it, all by themselves. There are no gatekeepers, no barriers to entry.
It’s only you and your hard work. And that can be a beautiful thing.
The app course and this blog cover all the traffic methods.
But whatever you choose, you will probably come to a point when you need to be at least somewhat good at writing if you want to be a complete digital marketer.
That’s why blogging is a great starting point, and the app course starts there.
Start practicing as you go
It is a good idea to start practicing as you go along with the course or this blog as well. Whatever you choose to do, try to implement it in the real world as well. The experience you gain from that will be far more valuable than any theoretical knowledge you gain.
Baby steps are perfectly ok here. In fact, they’re probably the only steps you will be able to take at the beginning.
And that’s ok. Starting is much, much more important than doing things perfect, especially at the beginning.
Also, while it is possible that you start seeing results pretty soon, the best thing to do is practice some patience. Digital marketing is a long term game, and expecting results after a few days will result in failure.
If you choose to start with blogging, there is no better way to practice than starting a blog.
If you choose to go with social media, video, or podcasting, create your profiles or channels and start posting as soon as you can. You will experiment with schedules, content plans, promotion, tools, and everything else as you go, but it’s critical to start.
If you want to start with advertising, you will need a test budget and run some small campaigns.
Measure and experiment
One of the most important things that will help you learn is measuring your progress.
In fact, one of the most famous phrases in all of marketing is “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”.
That’s why it’s critical to measure everything that you do.
The process of experimenting with your marketing will form around your own habits over time.
For starters, however, just grab a text file or an excel spreadsheet, and note your experiments in there.
Keep track of your progress and your results.
The general way you test something is the following:
- pick a strategy
- implement it and monitor the results (traffic, new followers, likes, comments etc)
- after the strategy works, make a hypothesis about how changing exactly one thing in your strategy would affect the results
- implement the change and see the new results
- if the results are better than before, keep the change, otherwise discard it
Not to oversimplify things, but that is the heart of marketing. You choose a strategy, measure it, and see whether new ideas improve it.
Keep learning
Finally, always keep learning and improving.
Digital marketing is always evolving, so you will need to stay ahead of the game if you want to become an elite marketer.
- SEO, Blogging, WordPress
- Social Media Marketing
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- Analytics, Measurements
- Youtube and Video
- Growth Hacking
- Much more
