Wow I can’t believe it is almost March and I have not posted an article in almost 2 months. Ahh well the fact that I don’t have time for blog posts is a good thing…I have been so busy that I have had to train another person to help out. This brings me to the topic of becoming an internet marketing professional. There may not be many formal schools teaching SEO or PPC but the internet and your public library are full resources.
Step 1: Get Busy Reading
Most people think that just because a book was written 5 years ago on internet marketing that it is completely outdated, but I would have to disagree. Although, the tools may have changed the fundamentals of SEO or PPC have not really changed. To rank well in Google you still need to optimize your onpage factors and get in bound links. For PPC there may be a ton of new tools and ad formats, but the keyword is still king and knowing the difference between exact and broad match keyword is still important. You will always need to know the history of internet marketing before you can really start seeing patterns in new mediums.
I have read all of these internet marketing books. Plus most can be found at your public library.
Step 2: Take Some Internet Marketing Courses
I would recommend learning PPC because you can master it in a shorter time frame than SEO plus all of the skills you learn in PPC will help you in SEO.
PPC:
- Go through the Adwords Learning Center and get Adwords certified
- Take an Advanced Adwords Seminar they are really good and Brad Geddes is a great teacher and will spend the time to answer all of your questions
- Bing also offers training for Adcenter PPC
SEO:
- The best Free SEO training I have found is the Challenge
Web Analytics:
- I just finished the Web Intelligence course at UBC and it was awesome. Plus the analytics evangelist Avinash Kayshik had a hand it its design. It won’t tell you how to use Google Analytics but it will teach all the theory you will ever need regardless of the web analytics platform.
Step 3: Stay Up to Date
The web is changing daily so you had better stay up to date or risk becoming obsolete by reading blogs. By no means are the following blogs an exhaustive list of internet marketing blogs, but they are my favorites that I follow daily. FYI if you are saying to yourself WOW that is a lot of reading, well not shit it is a lot of reading, but that is what it takes to be a professional internet marketer in today’s economy.
PPC:
SEO:
- SEOMoz
- Most SEO blogs overlap with their content so pick one you like and stick to it
Web Analytics:
Step 4: Get Some In-House Experience
Go work for a web based company’s marketing department for a few years. You will learn a lot and plus it will allow you to get caught up with your internet marketing reading. Furthermore, you need time to apply all the theories you have learned from books, blogs and taking classes.
Step 5: Up to You…
At this point you can go work freelance, get into the affiliate game or find a higher paying job somewhere else. IMO I would highly recommend staying away from agency’s because the stress might just kill you and the lack of autonomy will hurt your learning…