As a beginner, learning digital marketing and mastering it is the best way to build and grow a profitable online business in the long term. Creating brand awareness and selling products and services both on the internet and offline is becoming more complex than ever before with constantly evolving digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).
So, if you’re searching for repeatable, sustainable and cheaper ways to promote your business online, sell your products or provide professional services of any kind to a target audience, you may have to study digital marketing inside out.
To get you started on this guide on how to start digital marketing for beginners, let’s look at the fundamentals or basics first of all.
What is Digital Marketing?
Simply put, digital marketing are ways and means of creating and distributing content on specific topics on the internet to a target audience in a niche market with the goal of creating brand awareness, selling products and services or demonstrating subject matter expertise (SME) using digital devices and technologies.
At this technological age, the world is your oyster if you learn digital marketing and use it to consistently advertise your internet business, blog website, freelance services, or sell your own digital products and services, and so on.
Types of Digital Marketing
There are several types of digital marketing you can tap into and effectively use it to convert prospects to raving customers in the buyer’s journey sooner or later. Digital marketing types include:
- Content marketing
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Video marketing
- Guest posting
- Mobile marketing
- Etc
As a digital marketer, you need to understand that there is a lot you’ve to learn to become an expert in the industry but it’s doable. For instance, you’ve to get familiar with topics such as keyword research, SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, just to mention a few.
Knowing how to use these digital marketing tactics to wow prospects and convert them to clients or customers is at the heart of this subject. Today’s potential customer has many choices to make and there are sundry merchants who are readily available on the World Wide Web for your prospect to buy from.
So, for you to be top of mind to your target audience, you’ve to stand out from the crowd with high quality content about your brand, product or service. This is why you’ve to become SME (subject matter expert) in your industry to excel in the business of digital marketing.
The first step you’ve to take on how to start digital marketing for beginners is to create a blog you own and start publishing SEO articles that answer the questions of your readers or solve the problems and pain points of your potential customers.
Blogging is the best form of inbound marketing and for a reason. You can specifically target profitable long tail keywords in your blog posts, rank these pages on SERP (search engine results page) and start getting free targeted traffic from search engines like Google.com
Except you’ve deep pockets to hire a freelance writer, content writing skills is a requirement for a digital marketer’s success. Even with as low as 5c/word, you’ll pay about $50 for 1,000 word blog post and you can imagine the amount of money it will translate to if you consistently publish 3 to 5 articles per week.
The basic online tools you need to start a blog are reliable website hosting supports WordPress hosting and a registered domain name. HostGator.com is a cheap web hosting company you can sign up with and you’ll get free domain name from them as a first time customer.
But if you become a digital marketing expert or specialist, I can guarantee that you’ll be able to secure jobs in this field on a full time basis or part time basis or work as a freelancer. There are free and paid digital marketing courses you can enroll with online including Google digital marketing courses.
Having a certification will boost your CV/resume and reputation when you start searching for digital marketing jobs. However, if I’ve to start digital marketing as a beginner again, the steps below are what I’ll follow.
- Learn how the search engine works and how it ranks target keywords.
- Learn keyword research steps and use this skill to uncover profitable long tail keyword phrases to target.
- Start a blog with self-hosted WordPress CMS (content management system) platform and publish content on it consistently.
- Learn how to socialize and network with like minds in my target niche or industry on social media platforms online.
- Learn email marketing automation and use this unique digital skill to build email list of subscribers at scale.
- Master the art and science of ranking profitable keywords in the SERP and building backlinks that look natural.
- Familiarize myself with how to track analytics, measure data and make improvements in order to get better ROI (return on investment).
There are free resources through simple Google search and YouTube videos to learn how to start digital marketing for beginners. Some years back when I wanted to start affiliate marketing business, I simply went to Google and type “affiliate marketing case study” with and without the quotes.
I was able to read a lot of blog posts, watched videos and subscribed to email newsletters on affiliate marketing business. Next, I created a blog where I was able to write blog posts regularly and monetized my content with affiliate links.
You can start a blog and make money blogging online as a digital marketer while learning the ropes. Having a blog will expose you to every aspect of digital marketing including but not limited to email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, blogging, and what have you.
As a beginner, what I suggest you can do is to:
- Choose a specific niche market to focus on e.g. credit cards in personal finance niche.
- Create a blog and do on-page SEO targeting various topics on this subject as categories.
- Write blog posts fully optimized for your target keywords and regularly publish content on your blog.
- Build traction by using different types of digital marketing to engage your prospects, leads and customers.
- Build backlinks to specific blog articles to rank them on SERP so as to get free targeted traffic from search engines especially Google.
- Monetize your blog with affiliate links, contextual adverts, etc so that you can earn as you learn.
The above steps are the key elements to digital marketing success. Obviously, you’re bound to make mistakes along the way of your online marketing. That’s okay! What is important is the knowledge and understanding you’ll gain as you learn how to start digital marketing for beginners.
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