How I’m Learning Digital Marketing (and What I Wish I Knew Sooner)
Okay A few months back digital marketing really felt like drowning in acronyms. SEO, PPC, CTR, ROAS. I’d see these terms used and just nod like I understood when really I had no idea where to start. If you’re in that place right now hi I see you. This is basically a brain dump of what my learning has looked like far mistakes included.
Honestly my first mistake was trying to learn everything at. SEO one day paid ads the next then I’d get distracted by a media strategy video then jump into email marketing because someone on YouTube said it “has the best ROI.” I had like six tabs open all the time and finished basically none of it. If I’m being real with myself I wish I’d just picked one thing. Gone on it. And only branched out once I actually knew something well. Instead I ended up with this shallow layer of knowledge across everything and confidence in absolutely none of it.
Here’s something that took me long to figure out though. You really don’t need to spend money to start learning this stuff. Googles own free courses (Digital Garage, the Ads certifications) are honestly good. HubSpot Academy too well put together for a free resource.. Weirdly some of the best learning came from just reading case studies. Seeing how someones actual strategy led to an actual result taught me more than half the paid courses I almost bought.
Okay real talk. None of that theory clicked until I actually did something with it. I could read about SEO for two weeks straight. Still feel confused. Then I actually sat down. Optimized a real page watched what happened and suddenly it made sense in a way no article had managed. Same with running an ad campaign or going through a friends small business Instagram and auditing it like a real client. That’s when things started actually making sense. So if you’re stuck in the reading-and-watching phase now. My honest advice is stop and go build something. Doesn’t need to be for a paying client. It just needs to be enough that you can’t fake your way through it.
One thing that genuinely surprised me. Nobody expects you to have all the answers, not clients. I walked into this assuming you needed years of experience before anyone would take you seriously. Turns out what actually matters on is just being upfront about where you’re at putting in real effort and following through on what you say you’ll do. People notice the difference between someone faking expertise and someone whos clearly working to get better. The second one is way more trustworthy with less experience.
If I could go back and tell myself anything on day one it’d probably be this. Stop trying to go go deep on one thing first. Put your learning out in public somehow even if its messy. A finished website, a free project, whatever. Because that beats sitting on knowledge nobody sees. Don’t wait to “feel ready” before you start showing your work because that feeling never really arrives on its own.. Stop comparing yourself to people with a decade of experience. Compare yourself to who you were three months ago instead. That’s the comparison thats actually fair.
Still figuring a lot of this out as I go honestly. But that’s of the point. I care about getting real results, for the people I work with not just going through the motions of “looking” like a marketer.
If you’re a business looking for someone who’ll genuinely put in the work to grow with you lets talk.