The Best Way to Learn Digital Marketing and Become an Expert

If you want to learn digital marketing, you have to practice it. You cannot read a book about digital marketing and call yourself an expert. Taking part in a digital marketing training program and getting a certification also doesn’t make you an expert.

The technology and tools available in digital marketing is changing so fast that the only way to stay ahead in the game is to learn constantly and practice digital marketing.

If you are working as a digital marketer in a company, staying updated with the latest in digital marketing will happen naturally. But if you are not, then there is only one way that I know which works well for keeping yourself updated: and that’s, running an online project of your own and implementing digital marketing.

How I Got Started with DigitalDeepak.com

When I started this blog, I was hardly an expert in digital marketing. The website was a platform for me to experiment with digital marketing and learn more.

I registered a domain, installed a WordPress blog, wrote some articles and published them. Initially, almost no one visited my blog.

Then I added my website to Google’s webmaster tools, added analytics to it, added some plugins and optimized my blog for the search engines. I started getting some 15-20 visitors a week from the search engines.

Here you can see my Google analytics data that the first week I got only 17 visitors. That’s less than 3 visitors a day:

I asked my dad, brother, and some friends to check out the blog. I got just 2 visitors from the search engines that week.

Yes, this traffic doesn’t make any difference, but a journey of a 1,000 miles starts with a single step. A journey to a million subscribers starts with the first subscriber.

The most important thing is to get started. And I did that. If I did not start, then I would not be here today.

This initial set of visitors gave life to the blog. When I logged into Google Analytics, it was not a flat line. A bumpy line means – the blog has some life!

My next goal was to get 100 visitors a week. So I decided to write more articles. I wrote, wrote, wrote and here I am after 2.5 years.

Yesterday I clocked the highest number of visitors in a single day this blog has ever had:

And obviously my next goal would be to reach 1,000 visitors per day. The important question here is: how did I go from 17 visitors per week to 700+ visitors in a day? I learned digital marketing. I applied what I learned to DigitalDeepak.com

Learning something can be boring if you just keep learning. But if you immediately implement what you have learned and see results, learning becomes exciting! It puts an upward spiral for you to climb on!

As soon as I learned some SEO strategies, I applied them. I saw results in a few days, my blog traffic grew a little bit. This motivated me to learn more. Then I learned some social media strategies and went in the same upward circles.

This kept on going for the past few years until I reached a point where I can be called as a digital marketing expert. I could have never reached this position without having started a project like this blog.

Which brings us to the point: The only way you can learn digital marketing without losing motivation is to practice it. Use digital marketing to grow your own website. And if things go well, your website could also become your primary source of income one day.

How I Motivated Vikram to Start Blogging

I have been saying the same thing to my brother, Vikram Kanakaraju. He is a digital marketer at Zoho.com, and he knows enough digital marketing to write about it. His writing skills are not bad either. He is probably the easiest guy to influence because I am his elder brother!

I kept pushing him to get started. Finally I made him do it. He setup his blog ReachCustomers.com, wrote an article about content marketing, got 50 visitors (with a bit of help from me on social media) and so far he has got 2 subscribers.

Two real people who gave away their email ID so that they can read more articles from him! That’s enough motivation for writing his 2nd article. Which would probably lead to a few more subscribers and that would be enough motivation to write the next article.

One day he can reach 10,000 subscribers, and he would have written hundreds of articles on his blog. And that could lead to a book project, a consultancy business or something even greater.

Are You Motivated?

I hope you are motivated to start your blog and get it up and running. Your blog need not be about digital marketing. You can start a blog about a topic that you are passionate about. It could be about automobiles, electronics, cooking or parenting.

This blog project will be your canvas for experimentation and learning. If you read about a new social media strategy on a blog, you can apply it to your project and see the results.

This is not just learning but validated learning. You validate what you learned by applying it and seeing the results for yourself.

I don’t know what happens inside the brain when you learn something, implement it and get results, but I know that it is impossible to forget your results. With implementation and results, what you learned goes from the short term memory to the long term memory. It is the best way to learn.

How Can I Help You Get Started?

Now I have convinced you that you should be starting a website or blog project of your own to learn digital marketing. The next step is actually getting started with it.

If you have never started a website of your own, it may look like a difficult task in the beginning. But trust me, it is very easy. With all the latest tools available online, creating a website and taking it live is child’s play.

Some people ask me whether they need to be good in coding and development if they have to maintain a website. The answer is a big no. I don’t know how to write a single line of code!

In fact, I am a civil engineer and in college I learned how to make concrete with sand, cement, and steel! But I learned how to run websites and when I run into some trouble, I hire a freelance techie to get things done for me.

Leave a comment below and let me know what exactly is stopping you from setting up your blog. I am committed to helping you get started!