“How to Learn Online Marketing at Home”

The eyes of your customers are online today.  And first of all, yes, you can learn online marketing.  Anybody can, actually.  It’s not some mystical thing that only a few are privy to learn.  Anybody with the desire and the time needed for studying it can learn to become a great online marketer for their business.  To become successful at online marketing, you simply need to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to produce the best results.

Admittedly, this takes work and patience.  But the good news is that you don’t need to attend college and get a formal degree to get these skills.  Everything you need to learn is readily accessible online today. 

In this guide, you’ll discover some methods you can use to learn online marketing at home. In fact, this is exactly how I learned to become a full-time marketing consultant.   You can become an expert at this if you’re willing to invest the time.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is a major part of online marketing and is split into two defined areas: search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC):

1. With SEO, you’ll learn how to optimize a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines’ organic results, therefore helping to drive targeted traffic to your website.
   
   • An important thing to understand about SEO is that this is a discipline that changes continuously. Because of this, you’ll want to monitor the major players in SEO to keep up with search engine algorithm changes, so you can adjust your own methods accordingly.
     
   • There are many SEO courses online. You can get courses at sites like udemy.com , thinkific.com and teachable.com.  Pick one and get started!
     

1. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click marketing, will enable you to send traffic to websites with targeted ads.
   

1. • Google Ads is still one of the most popular PPC networks, which will show your ads on Google properties and websites that have the AdSense code included.
     
   • You can learn PPC easily online and relatively quickly. There are numerous courses you can take, including ones that will allow you to gain a Google Certification for PPC ads.
     
   • Once you’ve gained this accreditation, create some PPV (Pay Per View) campaigns of your own to gain the necessary experience you’ll need to get your own clients.

Social Media Marketing

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without social media. Millions of people visit social media websites each day, which is why learning how to market on these platforms is so important.  Businesses need to have a presence on the major social media platforms to engage with potential customers and build relationships.

Social media marketing has lots of advantages, such as:

• You can market your website for free by engaging your social media audience.
  
• You can buy effective advertising campaigns for as little as $5/day.
  
• You can get laser-focused on targeting the particular audience that you want to show your ads to.

Luckily, there are online courses available on these platforms themselves that will help teach you how to market to the millions of users that use these sites daily.  In addition, you can buy courses from independent experts who specialize in this. I have bought courses on Facebook advertising, social media marketing, podcasting and other online topic areas.   From paid campaigns to getting your content to go viral, if you want to learn about paid ads, there will be a course available that can help.

Email Marketing

Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, email marketing is still one of the best ways to market online.

The first step is to build an email list. Offer something valuable on your website—called a “lead magnet”— such as a free report or discount coupon, that is related to your products or services in exchange for their email address. This way, you can build a list of people that opted in to receive your emails.

To run a successful email marketing campaign, it’s important to understand your audience and what they want.  Knowing your ideal client and customers is crucial in marketing to them.  Once you understand what they want, you can craft an offer that will be attractive to them and then send that offer in an email to your list.

In order to build your email list and send emails to them, you’ll need to use an autoresponder. These are pre-written emails that are uploaded to an email management software program.  Some popular software for this is aweber.com, mailchimp.com and constantcontact.com.  There are many other email management platforms on the web, and many of them are free to get started.

With an autoresponder, you can also track your ads and their effectiveness.

To learn more about email marketing and how to effectively use an autoresponder:

• Pick a platform and start using it. All the major autoresponder platforms have numerous guides and articles about how to use them to run successful marketing campaigns.
  
• You can also find videos on YouTube that teach how to run email marketing campaigns with your chosen autoresponder.
  
• Or you can do an online search for a course that teaches you the information you need.

Do Your Research and Take Action

You can research online marketing tips at home and find out what techniques are working for others.  The internet is full of articles, videos and information about any marketing topic you can think of.   You can then take these ideas and use them yourself. Many techniques you learn may not be successful.  The marketing formula of “test, monitor and adjust” has not changed.  You’ll need to try different things to see what works best for you.

You’ll also learn your own way of working and which area of online marketing you prefer to focus on. Not everyone can be an expert at everything, which is why many successful online digital marketing agencies have a team of experts who each specialize in their own area.  Some of these areas may include building websites, doing graphic design and copywriting.

It’s actually fairly easy to become one of these experts yourself and do the online marketing for your own company or offer your services to other businesses like I do. You could make a nice part-time or even full-time income this way.

Tim Piccirillo has a full digital marketing agency under a personal brand.  He works with small businesses, entrepreneurs to increase their visibility online, get more customers and help them grow their business. He can be reached via email at tim@timpic.com or from his website at www.TimPiccirillo.com.