Almost a year ago I started my career in Digital Marketing, and I slowly started writing blogs about it.
Since then I have been meeting a lot of people who want to learn Digital Marketing and build a career in this field.
But the real challenge is, many of them do not really know how to take it forward. A course in Digital Marketing can be good, but many people aren’t in a situation to leave their full-time jobs or studies and enroll into a course.
And even if you take up an online course, hands-on experience is not always assured.
Then how do we gain some real hands-on experience here?
Well, there is one way.
Be a content creator.
To be specific, start a blog.
This is not a step by step guide to starting a blog. But I will tell you about why you should start a blog to learn Digital Marketing all by yourself.
Why blogs?
I’m not exaggerating, but blogging will teach you a lot of valuable Digital Marketing skills.
Here is a list of things that you will learn through blogging.
- Website management
- Content Management System (WordPress)
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Paid Advertising
Before going to each of them, it is important that you fix on your niche. Your blog should have a niche, it could be anything that you are interested in and can write about.
Now let’s see what we can learn through blogging.
Website Management
You will learn things like getting a domain, hosting plan, hiring a web developer and even getting custom email accounts.
If your aim is to become a Digital Marketer, website management is an essential skill. In most job roles, you will be responsible for some activities related to optimizing a website.
Content Management System (CMS)
There are many CMSs available, but I would wholeheartedly recommend WordPress. It is simple and has amazing versatility.
You can create a website using WordPress, even if you have zero coding knowledge. Just follow one of those tutorials online, and you will be fine.
You can decide the whole appearance of your website by choosing a suitable ‘theme’ and for every other functionality, there is a plugin available.
You can learn WordPress by taking free lessons from websites like WP Beginner.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You can have a business website or a blog, but end of the day it’s all about the traffic that you generate.
Apparently, a search engine is the best source of traffic ever.
We rely on various SEO practices to secure a top position on Google search. And if you start a blog, you will eventually learn them all.
WordPress has plugins like Yoast SEO, that will help you do all the On-Page SEO activities without much hassle.
You can learn more about On Page SEO tactics for WordPress here.
Social Media Marketing
How do you generate traffic when your blog is new and you rank poorly on search results?
The answer is social media.
You can promote your blog posts on social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Quora.
By promoting your blog on social media, you will learn to manage social media accounts for business. To be specific, you will learn to handle a Facebook business page, an Instagram business account, a LinkedIn page and so on.
Eventually, you will master the art of social media marketing and will learn to create and promote content online.
Creating social media accounts is quite simple; you can go to the respective social media platform and follow the instructions.
Email Marketing
Turn down everyone who says email marketing is dead.
Even today, it is one of the most powerful marketing tools.
There are bloggers and affiliate marketers who make tonnes of money only from their mailing list.
To start with, you can create a free account in Mail Chimp. The best part is you can even create a subscription form for free and start collecting email addresses on your website. All this can be done using WordPress plugins.
Whenever you publish a new blog post, you can send out an email to your mailing list and bring in some instant traffic.
There is no better way to learn email marketing than this.
You can go to Mail Chimp’s website and learn how you can create an account and set up a form to collect mail addresses.
And importantly, you can try all of this on your very own blog.
Paid Advertising
Most brands spend a huge amount of money on paid ads these days.
In the Digital Marketing industry, experts in PPC (Pay per click) advertising are always in demand and they are all well paid.
Two most essential paid advertising platforms that you should consider mastering are, Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
But paid ads on the web are not limited to these two places. It can be done on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Quora.
There are bloggers who use paid advertising to boost their affiliate marketing campaigns. They do this by promoting articles containing affiliate links and offers. End of the day, they get more traffic and sales from paid traffic.
For Facebook and Google ads, you can go through some of the walk-through tutorials on YouTube and learn the tactics.
The Google Academy for Ads offers courses on online advertising for free. You can take up a course and get certified with some effort.
Just a couple of things more
The reality is, blogging takes a good amount of time and effort. But the benefits are assured if you work hard.
If you work at least one hour a day, that is good enough to get started with blogging.
Only thing is, find a niche you can write about.
This is very important; never pick a niche just for the sake of producing content. If you are interested in beauty and fashion or may be automobiles, go for it.
And I agree that blogging requires some amount of investment like domain and hosting initially.
If you are not ready to spend all that amount now, get started with a free hosting plan from ‘000webhost’, which will help you learn things quickly.
Also, don’t forget to add your blogging efforts to your CV for Digital Marketing jobs. That will definitely help you stand out.
I hope this blog post could give you some relevant information about blogging and its immense benefits if you’re into Digital Marketing.
If you liked this article, please do share it with your friends and other aspiring Digital Marketers.
All the best
