Let’s get familiar with some of the basic terms and concepts in digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is promoting awareness of products or services, and the value they provide, to potential customers online.
There are a few ways to achieve this.
It can be organically, by creating content about a business that people are compelled to consume and share, without paying for the distribution of that content and letting various tools and platforms bring the attention of the potential audience to your content.
It can also be done by buying ads online that compel people to take the desired action, like visit a website, start a free trial, or watch an informational video.
Digital marketing is everywhere. While there is a lot of great information out there, there is also a lot of hype, misinformation, and even outright scams.
It is crucial to learn from trusted sources and always keep in mind the bottom line – digital marketing is still like any form of marketing.
It will take a lot of hard work, patience, practice and experience to learn the craft.
And in the end, it still comes down to promoting a product or service to an audience of people, preferably ones interested in buying it.
Because of that, digital marketing has a lot in common with traditional marketing.
There are, however, many adjustments to it as well, since the medium is very different than most traditional mediums, and the way people consume and process information, but also the way they make decisions, is very different.
Types of digital marketing
There are a few main ways to do marketing online:
- Blogging and Search Engine Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Forums, Communities and Groups Marketing
- Video and Youtube Marketing
- Podcasting
- Paid Advertising
- Growth Hacking
They can all be mixed and matched as needed.
The best recommendation is to apply them one at a time, so that you can easily tell which one is working.
After attracting the audience to your resources through marketing, there are several common ways to monetize and capture some of the value you have generated:
- Displaying ads
- Affiliate commissions
- Dropshipping
- Selling your own physical products
- Selling your own informational products
Where to start learning digital marketing?
Digital marketing is an ever-changing, fast-paced field. That’s both good and bad news.
The somewhat bad news is that you will constantly have to stay up to date with your knowledge.
But that is also great news, especially for beginners.
The relevant skills you learn are up-to-date with the latest changes to search engines, social networks and user behavior, and that will make you more valuable than some possibly more experienced marketers that might be stuck in an outdated paradigm.
So, even though it’s hard to gain experience and start actually being useful for your business or your client’s business, there’s always a new angle, a new opening, a new approach being developed that even new marketers can jump on and be one of the earliest adopters and the first experts on the field.
But it’s always best to start at least with some general basics on marketing, as evergreen marketing concepts are universally true because of the constant nature of human beings.
However, if you’re impatient about learning more practical skills and building a passive income stream for yourself in the process, then consider joining the Digital Marketing Empire team.