Digital marketing: a free curriculum
springboard.com
springboard.com
In my 20+ years of digital marketing (I was trying to get rankings on Altavista back in 1996), I've learned that the best way to learn digital marketing is by actually practicing it and doing it. You can certainly learn the basics, and this springboard curriculum is a good start. I hope they can keep with the updates, though, as even the "best practices" are constantly changing. The ways you optimized a website 5 years ago are different now, and some techniques are considered spam.
Start with the basics, learn what you can, and then learn by actually putting what you learned into practice. Create your own website. Create your own blog. You'll learn more that way.
Ah Altavista... back when you would make every single word on the page a keyword
It was a simpler time back then...
Reading books Doesn't make you an accomplished writer or even a writer for that matter
Who is your target audience?
Where can they be found?
What other things do they have in common besides a potential interest in the thing you want to promote?
What is your price point? Does it all need to be free, or can you throw some money at this?
Answer those questions and it should start narrowing down a place to begin.
To really understand digital marketing, you first need to understand marketing in general, and then learn how to apply it to digital channels.
As a digital marketer, what I've found most lacking in most digital marketing guides and articles is the one-size-fits-all approach. Having worked in-house for a few brands at this point in my career, what works well for business does not work well for another. I've worked for businesses where you'd be hard-pressed to get three sales from Facebook ads a month despite significant spending. I've worked for others where you go through periods where it's almost impossible to fail when spending money on Facebook ads.
My advice is to build a framework/approach to what you're doing so that you can operate with flexibility in any situation. Once you have that, you can better contextualize any article you read and once you're familiar with how the different channels perform/operate for what you're trying to market, you can really contextualize anything you hear/read.
A great start is reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. That book outlines typical channels you can try and acquire customers from. The book advocates casting reels in many lakes, seeing where the easy bites come from and then focus on those.
After traction, Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown is a great next step. That book advocates continuous experimentation to find compounding improvements, e.g. once you find a good acquisition channel, how do you approach improving/scaling it and how do you go about finding new acquisition channels.
But it's difficult to find info on the technical side of things. Like, methods for finding good marketing niches, the various types of marketing, i.e. email, facebook, etc.
Also, technical tools like mailchimp for mailing, google analytics. etc.
Curation of a learner pathway definitely has it's value.