Project Lynkgap

How to learn marketing?

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Total Time required: 2hrs 30 mins to 3 hrs.

1. Read this portion by Nat Eliason

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Pick Your Initial Focus

We can call these three phases Acquisition, Retention, and Conversion. To be a good specialist digital marketer, you need to be good at one subset of one of those areas. To be a good generalist digital marketer, you need to be good with at least one strategy from each of the three pieces of the funnel.

When starting out, focus on being a generalist. You won’t know what you’re most interested in yet, so building up a general digital marketing skill set will help you hone in on the areas that excite you most. You’ll also be more hireable since a digital marketer who can wear a few different hats is much more useful than one who only knows how to do Instagram ads.

Within Acquisition, you have:

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Search Engine Marketing
  • Advertising
  • Social Media
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Influencer Marketing
  • Viral Marketing
  • Publicity
  • Communities
  • Other Platforms

Within Retention, you have:

  • Email Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Community Building
  • Notifications
  • Retargeting

And within Conversion, you have:

  • Copywriting
  • Landing Page Design
  • Sales
  • Email Marketing
  • Retargeting

For getting started, you should pick one or two areas from each category to focus on, ideally within one of the typical “stacks” that you see from generalist digital marketers.

The Nat Stack

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Other Communities
  • Email Marketing
  • Landing Page Design

The Ads Stack

  • Search / Social Ads
  • Retargeting
  • Landing Page Design

The Community Stack

  • Other Communities
  • Social Media
  • Community Building
  • Email Marketing

The Pyramid Scheme

  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Landing Page Design

The Syndicator

  • Other Platforms
  • Email Marketing
  • Landing Page Design

Build Your Sandbox

You need a place to practice digital marketing, it’s the only way you’ll learn. Too many people spend all of their time reading blogs and books without implementing or testing what they’re studying, and as a result, learn nothing. Don’t be one of those people!

The best way to practice is to have a sandbox to bring your research back to. A place to apply what you’re learning. The sandbox should have a few criteria:

  1. Low-cost or free (aside from upstart equipment such as hosting)
  2. Low-stakes, so you’re not afraid to fail or show your work
  3. Public, so that you have to put your work out there in some manner

This gives you the freedom to test everything you’re learning without having to worry too much about the consequences of screwing up, while at the same time, getting you comfortable with putting your work out in the wild and being open to feedback.

As for what should your sandbox be, you have a few options. The easiest is to start a blog. That’s what this site was started as: a sandbox for learning content marketing, and it only became my full-time job on accident. A blog is a perfect sandbox for learning digital marketing since you can test almost all of the tactics on it, it’s low-cost, and you’ll improve your writing in the process.

If you do decide to go with a blog though, please, for all of our sakes, do not start a marketing blog. The Internet is littered with unhelpful marketing blogs by novice marketers. Starting one will be discouraging to you since it’ll be much harder to get traffic, and you’ll be writing about things you know nothing about, so please, don’t start a marketing blog.

Instead, write about something else you’re interested in. Some hobby you want to get better at, or some area of interest to you like psychology or history. Or write about current events. Or comedy. Whatever it is, just make it something you’re interested in and already know a bit about.

Obviously, your sandbox doesn’t have to be a blog, though. You could also start a lifestyle business, or find a local startup that will let you work on some of their marketing.

Initial Practice

At this point, you should have your sandbox in place, and have a few channels you want to focus on learning how to use to get traffic, retention, and conversions to your sandbox.

It should only take you an afternoon, and once you’re done, you’ll have a few things:

  1. A framework for setting and testing goals as you’re practicing
  2. A high-level understanding of the different areas of digital marketing
  3. Examples and ideas for further reading and experiments to try

We’re going to slightly modify their approach, though. The Bullseye Framework is an excellent tool for finding certain channels to try for your product, but it’s also useful for running experiments within a certain channel. For now, you want to stay focused on your stack, so you can use the Bullseye Framework to run certain experiments within those skills.

For example, let’s say you want to use Instagram as an acquisition strategy. You would go research all of the ways you can grow your Instagram and drive traffic from it, put them on a spreadsheet, rank the different ideas, then for the three that seem the best opportunities, design a small inexpensive test with a specific goal that spans over a week or two. At the end, check back and see how you did relative to your goal.

You can get this spreadsheet in the free Learn Digital Marketing Bundle

This is just your initial test run, and since you’re just starting out, focus on your acquisition channel first. You can worry about conversion optimization later. Set up a basic email capture on your sandbox, then work on the way you want to get traffic to it.

Pick the one you’re interested in and start following it, continuing to record and track the experiments in your spreadsheet as you go.

Research and Iterate

Now that you’ve made it into the novice stage and started trying some initial experiments, it’s time to see what else you could be testing and experimenting with. The goal here is to keep expanding your understanding of the areas of marketing you want to get better at, and again, the only way to do that is to try to apply it yourself as you’re going.

Your process at this stage should be:

  1. Run a few marketing experiments (usually for ~1-2 weeks)
  2. If an experiment succeeds, turn it into a system and keep doing it
  3. If one fails, find another one to run

That third step is where the research comes in. For each of the areas you’re trying to improve at, you want to find experiments you can run with that skill in order to get better at it. To find those experiments, look for case studies. Don’t read guides or listicles if you can help it; case studies will be more informative. You want to see specifically what worked for someone else, then turn that into your own experiment you can test.

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2. Watch this vid to learn content marketing:

Watch from 8:16 to 13:56

3. Watch this vid to learn marketing jargon:

Watch from 1:41

4. Watch another video by Natalia Kalinska

Watch from 2:01 to 15:50

5. Listen to this podcast:

Listen right here

Listen from 3:07 to 50:46

6. Now, take a break and have a convo on

Talk to your 3 smartest friends and discuss the following

  1. Organic SEO and Backlinks
  2. Building an engagement strategy

Bonus:

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpwD50v0Ubo
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkR7L41SroU

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