How to Start Digital Marketing for Beginners Guide

 

 

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.

 

1. Learn how the search engine works and how it ranks target keywords.
2. Learn keyword research steps and use this skill to uncover profitable long tail keyword phrases to target.
3. Start a blog with self-hosted WordPress CMS (content management system) platform and publish content on it consistently.
4. Learn how to socialize and network with like minds in my target niche or industry on social media platforms online.
5. Learn email marketing automation and use this unique digital skill to build email list of subscribers at scale.
6. Master the art and science of ranking profitable keywords in the SERP and building backlinks that look natural.
7. 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:

1. Choose a specific niche market to focus on e.g. credit cards in personal finance niche.
2. Create a blog and do on-page SEO targeting various topics on this subject as categories.
3. Write blog posts fully optimized for your target keywords and regularly publish content on your blog.
4. Build traction by using different types of digital marketing to engage your prospects, leads and customers.
5. Build backlinks to specific blog articles to rank them on SERP so as to get free targeted traffic from search engines especially Google.
6. 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.

 

How to Start Content Marketing and Grow Your Business Online

 

Content marketing is a veritable and viable way to grow your business online and increase the bottom line. So, investing money and quality time to create shareable and linkable content on your blog website and/or guest posting on third party websites is something you have to think of and consider right away.

 

First off, let’s get started with the fundamentals or basics of this topic so that you’ve a solid foundation to build on.

 

What is Content?

 

First and foremost and before I deep dive into content marketing process, I want you to know what content is. It’s simply a piece of text, visual, or both, which you decide to create about a topic idea as an expert in order to satisfy the wants and needs of your intended audience.  

 

It could simply be an answer to your target audience’s frequently asked questions (FAQs), solution to their problems or pain points, or a step by step guide on how to do something or complete a specific task.

 

Content can come in various formats such as blog post, video, podcast, ebook, white paper, an article, and so on. And having a successful digital marketing strategy in place will involve consistent creation, publication and marketing of high quality content to your target market in order to create and nurture a mutually beneficial relationship.

 

What is Content Marketing?

 

In its simplest definition, content marketing is the process of researching keywords which are targeting your potential customers’ pain points, creating content around these search queries, and distributing such content in places where your target audience congregate in order to create brand awareness, generate leads or close sales for your product, service or brand.

 

As a content marketer, you’ve to understand the customer journey in your niche market or industry so that you can effectively tailor your content to every stage of the buyer persona.  Do you know that content marketing is one of the best ways to grow an online business by leaps and bounds?

 

If you’re able to consistently create and publish high quality content on a timely basis, you stand to benefit immensely from your online marketing campaigns. As a matter of fact, content marketing is a mutually beneficial relationship between the content creator or brand and his intended audience.

 

Types of Content Marketing

 

There are different types of content marketing you’ve to learn and master in your digital marketing arsenal. I’ll briefly outline some of them below.

 

• Ebook
• Video
• Infographic
• Blog post
• Checklist
• Cheat sheet
• White papers
• Email newsletter
• Podcast
• Case study
• Presentation or slide
• Etc

 

Depending on what you think will resonate with your intended audience, you can effectively use any of the above content formats to market and grow your business online. However, you’ve to bear in mind that unique and high quality content which is timely delivered to your target audience are paramount to your success.

 

To add to that, you should not forget that variety is the spice of life when it comes to creating and publishing content which will consistently attract your prospects, leads and customers to your website. For instance, you should have an optimal mix of blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, email newsletter, etc used by your team to position your brand online as a thought leader.

 

To get you started so that you can hit the ground running in earnest, you’ve to follow the steps to content marketing which have worked well for me below.

 

Content Marketing Steps

 

1. Identify a target audience to serve.
2. Research pain points of your target audience.
3. Write down your content marketing goal for every piece of content you want to create.
4. Decide on the best type of content you want to create and publish which will solve the problems identified above.
5. Identify the right platform to distribute your content.
6. Promote your content.
7. Analyze, monitor and improve on your metrics and data.

 

Now, let me explain how to execute each of the above steps to content marketing which will help you to get the best bang from investing your money, time and efforts in writing content yourself or hiring a freelance writer to do it for you.

 

Step #1: Identify a Target Audience to Serve

 

Before you start creating content of any kind, you’ve to know who needs it i.e. who wants to consume your piece. Also, you’ve to know the stage in the customer journey where your potential readers are currently at. Having and understanding this information will help you to specifically tailor your content to the right group of people who are searching for the type of content you’ve to deliver.

 

For example, if you’re creating a guide for beginners on how to make money with affiliate marketing, you’ve to start from the very basics and move up from there. This is because your target market is beginners or newbies who want to learn how to start affiliate marketing business successfully.

 

This means you’ve to introduce and write about topics related to affiliate marketing business such as:

 

• What is affiliate marketing?
• Steps to start affiliate marketing.
• Affiliate marketing tools and resources
• Email marketing for beginners
• How to start a blog and make money
• And so on.

 

Step #2: Research Pain Points of Your Target Audience

 

Now that you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to find out their pain points, challenges or problems which they are currently grappling with and desperate to solve. You may be able to execute this task in a number of ways. First, you can use keyword research tools to discover questions people are asking in your target niche market.

 

Secondly, you can use reliable email marketing software to build an email list of subscribers and then send your list members questionnaires to fill out about their problems and the type of solution they desire from an expert like you.

 

Thirdly, you can use third-party websites and tools to spot specific pain points which desperate buyers are searching for solutions on the internet based on their search queries and patterns. Such websites include AnswerThePublic.com, Quora.com, Google Trends, BuzzSumo.com, etc.   

 

The crux of the matter is your ability to spot pain points and create solutions in the form of content. And this is where you’ll have the golden opportunity to monetize your blog content by recommending complementary affiliate products or services or product you own.

 

Step #3: Write Down Your Content Marketing Goal

 

At this level, all you need to do is to write down your content marketing goal which will guard and help you to focus on vital areas in your content creation process. What exactly do you want to achieve when you finally publish your blog post, video or ebook? Do you want to use it to build an email list of subscribers from the scratch or create brand awareness for your business?

 

Or do you want to demonstrate your expertise in your target industry or seen as a thought leader? Having a content goal in mind will help you to create winning content of some kind.

 

Step #4: Decide on the Best Type of Content to Publish

 

Now that you’ve a clear goal for your content marketing to pursue, the next step is to decide on the best masterpiece to create and publish. If you’re creating a blog for your business, you can regularly write blog posts around topic ideas and publish on your blog website.

 

But if you’re building a mailing list, the best option is to write an ebook or create a video to give away for free in exchange for subscribers email addresses. You may have to conduct competitors’ analysis to determine what is resonating with your target audience.

 

On another note, your potential readers and customer avatar should highly influence how you write your content. Top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU) are distinct stages of the buyer persona which you’ve to consider when creating content for your readers.

 

Before you write content of any type, you should get familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) and keyword research. These aspects of digital marketing will help you to scale your online business using search engines to generate free targeted traffic to your website.

 

Targeting long tail keywords have always been the fastest and best way to rank a web page on SERP (search engine results page) if your content is of high quality.

 

Step #5: Identify the Right Platform to Distribute Your Content

 

At this point, your content is ready for publication. What next? If you’ve written SEO article targeting a keyword phrase and you own a blog, you can simply turn it to a blog post and publish it. If it’s an ebook, you can upload it to your web hosting server and use it to start building a list of subscribers.

 

You should look into the option of distributing content on your social media accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, PDF sharing sites, and so on. However, for you to be highly successful as a content creator, you’ve to create a blog of your own preferably with self-hosted WordPress CMS platform.

 

Step #6: Promote Your Content

 

Unless you actively promote your website content, you may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to cover the costs of running and growing your business online. To this end, you’ve to learn a number of ways to promote your content on the internet. I’ll list some of them below.

 

1. Blogging
2. Guest posting 
3.  Creating and sharing videos
4. Social media marketing
5. List building
6. Search engine optimization
7. Etc

 

Mastering the above digital marketing methods will be of immense value to your business especially if you mix it with SEO and keyword research.

 

Step #7: Analyze, Monitor and Improve on Your Metrics and Data

 

The last step in our content marketing strategy is analyzing, monitoring and improving on your metrics and data. If you hope to get the best from your online marketing campaigns, you’ve to integrate analytics to measure website traffic and know where to improve on.

 

The very first step to get you started is to sign up for free Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You’ll be amazed at a number of data you’ll be able to generate about your target audience and how best to serve them with high quality content.

 

You can start content marketing today for your business and get better results by engaging our digital marketing agency right away. You’ll thank me later!

 

How to Promote Your Blog and Get Results

 

Having an internet marketing blog is an invaluable asset for any webmaster or online business owner who wants to go the whole hog to improve the bottom line of his or her ventures. This is why it’s important for you to know how to promote your blog in sundry ways and get the results you desire.

 

Blogging is a powerful tool to continually generate free targeted traffic from search engines if you invest time and/or money to do the needful. In our first article on how to create a blog, I started off to explain the basics of blogging for money and influence.

 

But as soon as you finish setting up your blog and publish your first blog post, the next onerous task is to promote your blog to your target audience. If you ask me, blog promotion is a Herculean task a lot of bloggers continually contend with on a daily basis if you don’t have the hang of it.

 

For you to succeed in blog marketing, you’ve to develop a plan and strategy and follow it to the letter in order to become successful at it. To get started, you’ve to first ensure that there are high quality blog posts published on your website worth reading, sharing and linking to.

 

Secondly, you’ve to optimize your blog so that your marketing campaigns and efforts will be minimal or at best result driven. If you research and aim at the right keywords, there is every chance that your promotional efforts will hit its target and bring in ideal prospects, leads and customers to your business.

 

Blog promotion can be done through paid adverts and free advertising methods. While free blog promotion is not entirely gratis, you’ve to spend quality time and energy to make it work. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

 

SEO is twofold i.e. on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On page SEO are activities you execute on your blog website to make it search engine friendly and highly findable for your target keywords related to your business, products or services.

 

This involves having your search query in blog post title, meta description, body of content, interlinking related blog posts and web pages, using LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, and so on.

 

On the other hand, off page SEO strategies are digital marketing campaigns and content distribution efforts you do outside of your website in order to build backlinks and bring targeted traffic to your blog on a regular basis.

 

This could include guest posting, content marketing, blog commenting, video marketing, social media marketing, etc. The essence is to build authority, trust, popularity, credibility and expertise around your business blog, create brand awareness and ultimately attract ideal prospects, leads and customers in the long run.

 

With that being said, let’s go through some of the best ways to promote your blog and maximize your return on investment assuming you have stellar content already published on your blog.

 

Guest Posting

 

Guest blogging is a strategic method of creating brand awareness and building backlinks to your site by publishing content on other blog websites. The first step is to research and find blogs and websites with similar themed topics like yours and proposing guest post to the blogger or owner of the site.

 

If approved and accepted, you’ll publish your content on the blogger’s blog and then have the opportunity to include an author bio where you’ll embed an anchor text link to your blog for targeted traffic.

 

The greatest challenge of guest posting is getting accepted by bloggers who own the sites where you want to be featured. Successful bloggers hardly rub shoulders with upcoming bloggers. But you can increase your chances of getting approved by doing the following:

 

-Read and familiarize yourself with the blog you want to write for before cold pitching. You’ve to dig deep into the archives to read, learn and know what content has been published. This will help you to spot content gaps to fill and get quick approval.

-Be active at the blog comments section of your desired blog in order to familiarize yourself with the blogger through constant interaction. It’s easier to relate with a friend than a stranger.

 

Content Marketing

 

To start with, “What is content marketing?” It’s simply the planning, preparation, creation, distribution and marketing of content to an intended audience in order to attract qualified prospects, leads and customers to a business website.

 

Marketing content successfully on the internet to a target audience can be executed on various platforms where you believe your potential leads congregate.  And the best way to succeed with inbound marketing is creating high quality content both on your blog and outside of your blog.

 

Successful content marketing starts with good keyword research to uncover profitable long tail keyword phrases to focus on. You can also do competitor content analysis to discover gaps to further cover and write SEO articles to address immediately.

 

You can diversify your content distribution via videos, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, audio, infographics, blog posts, etc. The most important factor to get the desired result is the quality of your content which will help you to generate engagement.

 

Having a good handle on content marketing and guest blogging can be of immense value to your business bottom line.  The best you can do is to master different methods of promoting your blog at scale one at a time.

 

Personally, I started with content marketing and gravitated to guest posting before attempting other ways to promote a blog when I was actively advertising my freelance writing services.

 

List Building

 

If you want to ease your blog promotion efforts, you should start building an email list of subscribers as early as possible. All you need to build an email list of subscribers from scratch is to sign up with a reputable email service provider (ESP).

 

ESPs are a dime a dozen on the internet but GetResponse email marketing software have all the features you need to get started including autoresponder, broadcast capability, automation tools, just to mention a few.

 

You can create a lead magnet as quickly as you can from questions your target audience is asking by making use of keyword research tools and websites to discover them. Provide the answers and compile it as a PDF ebook to give away for free.

 

As soon as you start building your mailing list, you can send your subscribers a link to your new blog post every time you publish one.  This is how to promote your blog to a highly targeted readers and maximize your marketing efforts.

How to Monetize a Blog and Maximize Your ROI

 

 

As you may already know, creating a blog is just the bare bones of blogging for money on the internet. Until you start earning money from it consistently, you may not be completely happy running a blog because you’ll be spending cash on online business tools such as domain name renewal, paying for web hosting fees, hiring freelance writers to create content for you if need be, etc.

 

It’s when you start making passive income online from your blog, month in and month out, that you’ll become keyed up to invest money, quality time and energy to run and grow your business blog.  As you may be aware, there are many moving parts to a successful blogging career including:

 

• Choosing a niche market to focus on,
• Registering a domain name as your business website address,
• Buying web hosting to enable you host your blog website online 24/7,
• Installing a blog on your domain name,
• Optimizing your blog for SEO (search engine optimization), and
• Creating and publishing constant but high quality content on your blog.

 

The above steps and tasks are relatively easy to complete if you’re passionate about your blogging topic. But the hardest part is making money from your blog on a regular basis.  This is where the topic of today on how to monetize a blog always becomes a hard nut to crack for a lot of beginners. But I’ll provide you with the best answers and solutions for you to hit the ground running.

 

The first step you’ve to take to get on track is to conduct keyword research. Profitable blog monetization starts with deep keyword research so that you can discover the types of search queries related to your business to target which online shoppers are typing into search engines to find product, service or information as solution to their problems.

 

The essence of doing this task is to continually generate targeted traffic to your blog website especially from search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com, etc when potential leads and customers type keyword phrases related to the solutions you are providing from your business to solve their problems.  

 

As soon as you’re able to optimize your blog for profitable long tail keyword phrases, you may be able to get free targeted traffic to your blog website on a constant basis, holding all other factors constant.

 

You should not forget that without the right people coming to visit your website, your chances of making money from your blog is slim. You can always get keyword ideas from various sources by making use of keyword tools and websites dedicated to keyword research strategies.

 

After you’ve conducted keyword research and generated search query ideas, the second step is to optimize your website for these keywords so that it becomes easier for you to monetize your blog post content.  Website optimization involves a lot of housekeeping details. This includes having your target keyword in blog titles, meta description, the content of your blog post, page URL or path, alt text for uploaded images, having a web of internally linked keyword structure, and so on.

 

The third step is writing blog post that is worth monetizing. To be frank with you, a lot of bloggers fail at this. Making money online is all about giving out the best to your target audience in terms of creating high quality and unique content in order to prime them for further marketing and action taking.

 

If you have published EATable content on your blog, monetizing it is not going to be a problem. You should not forget the fact that Google expects website owners to demonstrate EAT (expertise, authority, trust) for published content on their blogs as much as possible.

 

The truth is that if you constantly create high quality content and have ways of generating targeted traffic to your blog, you’ll discover it’s easy and simple to monetize your blog. And this era of AI writing tools like ChatGPT and the rest, you should be able to generate content you can modify for uniqueness.

 

Here are some of the best ways to make money from your blog.

 

Method #1: Affiliate Marketing

 

Affiliate marketing business is one of the best ways to make money online for beginners. Your job is to create high quality content around themed topics and publish them on your blog regularly. From there, you can sign up with affiliate programs that align with your published content and embed their affiliate links at appropriate places in your blog posts.

 

As long as your content is helpful, you should expect blog readers to follow your call to action (CTA) which should be a referral link to a merchant’s landing page. And when your referrals buy product or service from the vendor’s website, you’ll earn affiliate commission.

 

However, you’ll be more successful if you start affiliate marketing and integrate list building system with it your digital marketing campaigns. Also, for you to really make money with affiliate marketing, you should be able to find products and services that solve pain points and problems of your target audience.   

 

You may also want to look into CPA marketing to monetize your blog. Cost per action (CPA) marketing does not require you to close sales before you earn affiliate commission. Your task is to generate targeted leads to your vendor’s website and earn referral commissions.

 

You can fast track your affiliate marketing business success by signing up with reputable affiliate network programs such as CJ.com, Impact.com, Amazon.com, ShareASale.com, Clickbank.com, etc. It will help you to focus on the marketing side of your affiliate websites while getting affiliate products and services in one place.

 

Method #2: Provide Freelance Business Services

 

One of the ways to monetize your blog is by providing freelance business services to webmasters and online business owners who are willing and able to hire freelancers such as content writers, virtual assistants, web designers, freelance bloggers, etc.

 

Some years back, I started a successful online writing business career by creating freelance writer website and using it to get high paying clients from search engines. All I did was to focus on writing high quality and unique content around low competition long tail keyword phrases related to my target niches.

 

I discovered that starting a blog around my target niche market is one of the best ways to make money online without spending a fortune. The truth is that a lot of people out there are ready to outsource any type of online jobs including graphic design, web design, content writing, virtual assistance, and so on where they have no time or requisite digital skills to execute such tasks.

 

You can create a dedicated page on your blog to showcase your web business services with a “contact us” page for your potential clients to reach out to you. If you’re able to engage in regular blogging targeting long tail keyword phrases, you’ll be able to get website visitors who are eligible for further communications and monetization.   

 

Method #3: Ad Network Revenue Monetization

 

For you to make money from ad networks, you’ve to generate avalanche of targeted website visitors on a monthly basis. This is a major criterion to generate and earn revenue from ad network that will be enough to pay the bills.

 

As soon as you build a website or create a blog, your top priority and focus should be how to get targeted traffic consistently which you can monetize with reputable ad networks. In case you don’t know, an ad network is simply an online advertising technology platform that aggregates, brokers and sells ad inventory between advertisers and digital publishers.

 

Some of the most reputable and popular ad networks you can look into include Google Adsense, Media.net, PropellerAds.com, etc.

 

Method #4: Sponsored Post

 

For you to start a blog and make money with sponsored posts, you’ve to optimize your blog and make it super attractive to sponsors. Your blog optimization should be mobile friendly with dynamic theme. 

 

As long as you’ve themed topics discussed on your blog, you’ll be able to get targeted sponsors if your domain authority is high or above 20 or so. Also, you’ve to build authority backlinks over time. In addition, make sure you create essential web pages including About Us, Contact Us, Advertise With Us, Write For Us, etc, pages.

 

You will do well and better with sponsored posts as a blogger if you’re an influencer or even as a micro-influencer.  You can get sponsors from inbound marketing by blogging regularly or by making use of cold pitching strategies and outreach tools to find ideal sponsors.

 

Method #5: Write an Ebook and Sell It Online

 

Ebook writing is one of my favorite ways to quickly monetize a blog and make money. However, you’ll get the best results if you integrate list building strategies with it. By building traction around your book launch, you’ll be able to discover if it will sell in the first place.

 

There is nothing complicated about how to write an ebook and sell it online. The first step is to research ebook ideas that will sell in your niche market and create an outline to serve as your guide. Every chapter of your ebook should focus on solving a problem for the buyer.

 

Apart from writing and selling ebooks from your own website, you can use Amazon KDP to increase your reach and become more visible to global market. Self publishing has become income generator for a lot of bloggers today. You can write non-fiction and fiction books depending on your writing skills and ability. 

There are so many ways on how to monetize a blog and make money blogging online. The above 5 ways can get you started in earnest.