In the previous tip, we had a look at the power of online content to attract high quality attention from users. We discussed how paid advertising is short term and content marketing is long term.

People pay attention to content, and you can either earn that attention by create good quality content yourself, or you can rent out user’s attention from other websites. When we rent out that attention, we call it paid advertising.

Now we understand that Content is King. We need to create high quality content to attract the attention of our target audience. Let’s have a look at how to go about creating content that strikes a chord with your users and gets their high quality attention.

A lot of people ask me: “Deepak, how are you able to write so much on your blog and not have any writer’s block?” The answer to this question is very simple, but it is difficult to practice. My answer is: “I create content with my user first in mind, and I focus on a single user.”

One of the reasons why people get “Writer’s block” is because it is very difficult to communicate via text to another human being without having that human right in front of us. None of us ever get “Talker’s block”. We don’t forget what to say when we are with people, in person. The conversation just flows.

To talk directly to your user, through the online medium, is simple but difficult. You need to understand and dissect the concept of human to human communication, to make the process easy. And that’s what we are going to do in today’s post.

Medium is Secondary, Users are Primary

When we are creating content on the digital medium, we are using a personal electronic device. The goal of the device is to communicate the content that you have created through time and space to another person who wants to consume your content. On the web, all of us are content creators and all of us consume content. The web connects us all, but the web exists because of us.

The technology is just a medium to transmit information. When you are talking to a person face to face, you still have a lot of technology that is working to make that communication possible. This technology has evolved over millions of years. The light in the room makes it possible for our eyes to see the other person, and for the other person to see us. The air in the room helps transmit the sound vibrations from the speaker’s tongue, to the listener’s ear drums.

It is easy for us to communicate in person with people because we really do not think about the technologies like the light, how the eyes convert the light into electric signals to the brain, the tongue, the ears and so on. It works in the background, and our mind focuses on the other person. We are looking at the other person and observing how he/she is listening and responding. If we put too much mental focus on the technology that makes the communication possible, we would lose focus on what we are communicating, to whom we are communicating, and how the other person is perceiving the “content” we are transmitting.

We put too much focus on the technology and the medium when we are creating content for users via the web. It is difficult because internet is just a few decades old. The medium hasn’t disappeared into the background, yet.

Just a few hundred years back, we did not even have the telephone to have a two way communication across space. Humans have evolved for millions of years on the planet earth, and our current species is only as old as 70,000 years. The last 3 decades of it is just 0.0004% of our species. It’s a very short time to get adjusted to the technology we use for communication, and that’s the hard part about digital marketing.

When creating content online, many marketers focus too much on the technology and the medium. People think too much about the right images, the right design, the format of the content and delivery of the content. Digital marketing technology enables all the bells and whistles in the communication, but as marketers we have to remember that the medium and the technology is just a means to communicate to the end user.

The medium doesn’t matter too much. In a face to face conversation, we still still say what we want to say even if the room is dark lit, and it’s a bit noisy in a public space. It doesn’t affect the communication THAT much. What matters is what you say. Yes, a better meeting room, with good sound insulation will enhance the communication in person, but we still communicate.

Similarly, when creating content on the digital medium, there are a lot of improvements that can be made on how the content is delivered and how it is consumed, but what really matters is what content is being communicated, and to whom it is communicated.

As you grow as a digital marketer, your focus will become near 100% on the message and not the medium. Your focus will be on the content and the user consuming the content. The technology and medium will disappear into the background.

Has My Idea Become Your Idea?

Right now you are reading this article on my blog, or as a chapter on my book. But the same concept can also be communicated to you in person when we meet at an event.

The same idea can be transferred to you via a PDF ebook, or a Kindle book, or a podcast. I could talk about the same concept on a video and post it on my YouTube channel where you are a subscriber.

End of the day, what really matters is – has my idea been transferred to your mind and do you get what I am saying? Do you now have the same idea in your mind? If that goal is achieved, then we have succeeded as marketers (or digital marketers).

Though I create content that is being read by tens of thousands of people on the web, I always write to one user in mind, YOU.

I create every post on social media, every YouTube video, every podcast, with one user in my mind. This user (YOU) is interested in the topic of digital marketing and learning more about it.

Every user / reader / subscriber is consuming my content alone, from behind the screens of their personal devices. People rarely read emails when another person is sitting right next to them. Email, and most of the other online communication channels are personal and user specific.

I conduct events, manage clubs and speak at conferences so that I can meet my audience in person. The more I meet my readers and followers in person, the more I understand who my target audience is.

As a digital marketer, it is important to meet your audience in person, at least a sample set of it, so that you know whom you are talking to, and what they are looking for from you in terms of advice and guidance. Do not underestimate the power of interpersonal interactions with your audience in the real world.

Online surveys, poll questions, and other ways to build customer avatars and user personas are extremely helpful to understand the needs of your audience, but with such market research, you will only ask questions based on what you know you don’t know. You are looking to find out the known unknowns.

However, when you meet your audience in person, you will start learning about a lot of things that you didn’t know that you didn’t know. Unearthing the unknown unknowns is very important – and that can be done only by meeting your audience in person. Because they are the reason why you are creating content from behind your screen. The digital mediums work because there are real people behind the screen, using it, to hear from people they want to hear from.

I have met young 19 year college students who have a fire in their belly to start an online business. I have met early stage startup entrepreneurs with frustration in their eyes because their digital marketing is not yielding results. I have met 60+ year old gentlemen, who don’t want to ignore digital marketing just because their life has passed them by. These are the things I can never learn with online surveys, questionnaires and spending time on social media.

I hope this tip helped you reframe your understanding of digital marketing and online communication.

Hundreds of new ways to market online will keep coming (and going), but all you need to focus on is the user. Understand and learn how to use technology and digital marketing tools, but do not lose focus on the user.

Do not get distracted by the latest and greatest marketing tool, or communication channel. If you are communicating the right thing, to the right person, at the right time, the medium disappears. You need to master the medium, and the medium disappears to make way for connecting with the user, for which the medium exists in the first place.

In a real world conversation, you don’t focus on the way your eyes work, the way your ears work, the light in the room etc. You focus on the person sitting on the other side – because you instinctively know that’s more important. As a successful digital marketer, you will consciously lose focus on the medium, and put your focus on the end user – not because you don’t know how to use the medium, but because you understand that the user is more important than the medium.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/2HzHOsL

There are two main ways to drive traffic to your web properties on the internet. You can create content, and let people come to you, or you can pay for online advertising and get traffic from various sources.

I do a mix of both. I have people visiting my website through the search engines and social media without any cost incurred, and I pay for traffic on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

If I want another 1,000 users to my blog, I can go about it in two ways. I can spend money on paid advertising and get those visitors as early as tomorrow. Or I can write an article that people are searching for, and that article would attract 1,000 new users over a period of time.

Investing in content vs. investing in paid advertising is like the difference between buying a home and renting a home. If you do not have a lot of money with you, you cannot build or buy your own home. However, you can rent out a big home and pay a rent monthly.

In the short term, renting out a home might look like a cheap option. However, if you decide to stay in the rented home for 10+ year, the rent would end up costing you more than the purchase price of the house. A home is an asset that gives returns over a period of time, not immediately.

Creating content, that gets traffic over a period of time is just like investing in an asset like home. There are articles on my blog that has been written more than 3 years before and they still get traffic to this date. The traffic comes from other websites via links (which also helps me in my SEO), via social media, via search engines and through word-of-mouth marketing.

Content is what gets attention on the web, and the more content you create, the more attention you will get from the internet users. The higher the quality of the content, the higher is the quality of the users visiting you. The higher the volume of content, the higher the chance that you will attract a huge number of people looking to read various types of content.

Even if you look at paid advertising, people are not necessarily paying attention to the ads. What internet users are attracted to is content. When you create your own piece of content, you are attracting people by yourself. When you are advertising via different mediums to get traffic, you are basically renting out the attention from other content creators.

We might think of Google and Facebook as a search engine and a social media network, but what they actually have is content.

Google organizes the world’s information, using a sophisticated algorithm, that gives you results based on what you search for. It’s content. They are curating the content, than creating content, and it’s still content that is worth paying attention to.

Facebook collects content from our friends, colleagues and family and delivers it on our news feed. Facebook organizes all the personal content that our “friends” on Facebook create.

YouTube gives a platform for content creators, and internet users visit YouTube for the content it delivers. YouTube makes money from advertisers by renting out the attention of the internet users, which was earned by the content on YouTube in the first place.

So do not think of content marketing and paid advertising as two different things. Both depend on content for the attention of the internet users. In content marketing, we earn the traffic through content creation on our own website platforms. In paid advertising, we are renting out the attention of people who are attracted to content created by other content creators.

The only reason why paid advertising still exists on the internet is because not everyone wants to create content all the time, and some people want traffic in the short term. There is nothing wrong with it, in fact, if we know how to convert the traffic we pay for into profits, we can scale paid advertising easily.

However, to build wealth on the internet for the long term, it is important to build our own content assets which increase in value over time exponentially. Paid traffic comes to the website, a few people come into our marketing funnel, and the rest of the people bounce off.

Content marketing however has the capacity to bring new visitors to our website even 10 years down the line, as long as you make sure that your website is healthy and accessible by internet users.

So learn to create and distribute content efficiently. Learn to create content that your target audience wants to read. Do market research, keyword research, and ask your users directly on what they want to learn about from you. Distribute the content via email marketing, social media channels and re-marketing.

If your content is really good, people will award it with sharing it, linking to it from their websites, and subscribing to you to get more content from you.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/2YyJbPq

I am planning to create a new series of blog posts related to digital marketing tips and tricks. Digital Marketing is a very wide topic, and it is almost impossible to learn one subject at a time and keep progressing in a linear fashion.

The best way to learn digital marketing is to keep learning and practicing. Fundamentals are important, but you should also keep yourself updated with the latest changes happening in the industry.

Every aspect of digital marketing is growing and changing on a monthly basis. SEO keeps changing because the search engine algorithms keep changing.

Email marketing keeps changing because the ESPs evolve on how they tread mass emails and automated emails. Rules around opt-in subscription and user consent keeps changing as new laws come into effect for privacy, data collection and spam emails.

Search engine marketing keeps changing as Google Ads and other platforms bring AI and machine learning into the platform. They are increasingly becoming goal oriented and will do the optimization without human interference.

Social media marketing keeps changing because the social media platforms keep changing their algorithms from time to time. Organic reach is at an all time low and you cannot win in social media without having an advertising strategy.

In this series of blog posts, I will be covering many tips and tricks in no specific order. As of now I plan to publish 100 tips over the period of next few months. I will be discussing about fundamentals, tools, latest techniques, tricks and anything that is related to digital marketing.

After I publish all the 100 tips on my blog, I might also publish it as a book with 100 digital marketing tips and tricks. Each tip will be a chapter in the book, and there might be no specific order to it. The book will be free to download for my readers, and it will be available as a print book on Amazon and other online e-commerce destinations.

One of the reasons I am going to publish these tips as blog posts first and then as a book is because I am looking for continuous feedback you (my reader) on what you want to read. The No.1 rule of digital marketing is to find out the needs of the audience and then deliver it to them. It would be ironic to publish a book first and then discover that my audience wants something else.

Some of these tips will also contain short 5-10 minute video tutorials. If I am explaining a concept that is theoretical, I might have illustrations.

If I am explaining on how to use a specific digital marketing tool, I might be making a screen cast video that goes over the functionality if the tool. These videos will also be published on my YouTube Channel.

Thanks for tuning into this series, and if you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Let me know what tips and tricks you want to learn in Digital Marketing and let me start writing as soon as I get my initial set of ideas.

I will also be updating the links to all the tips on this page over time as they keep getting published.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/2WPHEUK

Education is an interesting and exciting sector for me. I love learning new things, and I love teaching.

When I learn something new, I feel powerful. This feeling is as strong as success, achievement and love. And most people who read books, do online courses, and hear audiobooks would agree with the fact that learning something new is the most satisfying things you can do in our week.

The internet has made it easy to learn from videos, blog posts and other channels of communication with the trainers. Apart from the trainer being able to teach a student from a distance, the trainer is also able to replicate the information to execute one-to-many mentorship efficiently. With the power of the internet, education has been revived to suit the learner’s need and style.

I expect my life’s work to be in the education sector. And I keep looking for answers that will help me contribute better. I keep wondering about the finest details of online education. This curiosity has led me into a series of questions about how people learn from the other side of the screen.

We bloggers, authors, YouTubers, information product creators, do not think too much from the shoes of our customers (students) because we do not meet them often. It is hard, but it is important.

Fortunately, I am in a position to get answers to these questions from a large sampling size, and we can confidently average out the insights about education for the whole country, and to some extent the whole world.

I posted a series of questions on my Facebook Group – Learn Digital Marketing, and in this blog post, you will learn what I learned from the results of the surveys.

If you are an online trainer, or a company in the online education space, you will find these answers extremely insightful and could guide your product creation to align with the needs of your customers (or students).

1. What do you think is the future of education?

One of the questions I asked my audience of 125,000+ members on the Facebook Group was – what do you think the future of the education will be?

Most of the people voted that projects are more important than anything else. When you do a project, you are able to prove that you not only know how to do the project, but you can also execute it.

I agree with the results. It doesn’t matter if the training is offline, online, live, simulated live or hybrid. The only thing you need to grow a skill and prove that you have that skill is to do a project.

Seth Godin says the same thing in his book: Linchpin. Resumes prove what you have learned, projects prove what you can do. Certificates and graduation from well known institutions are no longer markers of execution skills.

Startups and big companies alike are looking for people who can execute. And the best way to show you can execute is to do a project. Your project is your resume.

If you want to learn digital marketing and get a job in digital marketing, start a blog, write content, do SEO, build email subscribers, build social media following and do paid ad campaigns for your own blog. You would’ve proved that you know Digital Marketing. A certificate of course completion from a digital marketing institute is probably not going to be of much value.

If you want to get a job as an iOS developer, develop an iOS app. It shows your knowledge + execution skills. People hire you for what you can execute, not what you know about. People want to get things done, and they pay for done. Not can do.

2. What do you want to do after learning online?

Continuing from the previous discussion of how important learning is, let’s look at what people want to do after learning a course online. Online courses are made up of multiple modules and each module has several lessons inside it.

If you have learned something from an online course, the best way to remember the lesson is not to refresh it after a few months, but to implement the learning so that you can see the results and remember your lesson forever.

Most of the people have voted that they want to implement what they have learned.

When you are designing online courses, the most important task is to design assignments and exercises after every lesson. When online students do an exercise after learning something, they will remember it forever.

For example, in my Google Ads course, my first exercise for my students is to create a Google Ads account and get familiar with the interface. The second assignment is to create a list of keywords that they can target their ads for. The third one is to actually create the ad. It has 10 modules in total, and by the time they complete all the assignments, they will be able to master Google Ads through implementation, and remember it forever.

Doing an assignment and validating the results go into memory harder than any type of passive learning. It goes harder into memory because there is emotion attached to it. It’s hard to get emotional reading about the top 10 Google Ads tips. However, deploying an ad campaign and watching the results has emotions attached to it.

Your implementation might have great results, or it might fail. If it gives results, you have validated that your learning was right. You remember it better. If you have failed, you will find out why it didn’t work and learn more. Your assumptions will turn into facts.

3. How do you feel after learning something new?

For any product or service to get traction, there has to be a good feeling associated with it. If you buy a new car, it makes you feel positive on so many levels (at least for the first day). When you eat good food at a restaurant, you feel happy and satisfied. It is very hard to get traction for a mass consumer product without having strong positive feelings associated with the usage of the product.

People who are into offline education and ignore online courses like to think that online education is a fad. So the important question to ask here is: do people feel positive after learning something new from an online course?

Here’s the answer…

People feel satisfied, productive and powerful (in that order) after learning something new from an online course. That’s the reason the online education industry is growing and will continue to grow for a long time to come.

There are positive feelings associated with it, and it honestly creates value without friction. People can learn from the comfort of their home, without any time wasted in travel and logistics.

4. Do you want the trainer to appear on a video?

When I create online courses, I do a hybrid video of the screen recording or the presentation slide deck, along with recording my face in the web cam. Since people are learning remotely, and do not have the trainer in person teaching them, I thought that recording my face in the web cam is a good idea.

People consuming my courses gave a feedback that the web cam video in the video is distracting and it is ok to remove it. And I wondered how many people really wanted me to be on the camera.

Surprisingly, most of them do not want to see the web cam recording of the trainers face.

They know that it is coming from a trainer they already know, look up to and respect. It’s not required that they need to see the trainer all the time.

I would now create course videos, without the web cam recording embedded in the videos. And if I do, it would probably be for a minute or two when I start the training and fade away that part of the video to focus on the content in slide decks and on the screen. A profile picture of the trainer’s face in the first slide is also a good idea.

5. How long do you want the online training videos to be?

For TV series episodes, people stick to 20 minute content with 10 minutes of ads, titles and credits. Or people stick to 45 minute episodes with 15 minutes of auxiliary content.

I’ve always wondered what is the ideal video length for online training videos. What is the attention span required for learning something as compared to watching an entertaining video?

Most of the people seem to very strongly prefer 10-15 minute videos for online courses.

Watching an online training video takes a lot more intellectual processing power than watching entertainment content. 10-15 minutes is an ideal length for engaging students through online videos.

If I am teaching something that might take 20-30 minutes, it is ideal to break up the video into two parts and deliver it in sequence.

6. Do you eat or drink while learning online?

I was wondering, if people eat or drink something while they are learning from an online course.

So I asked them this question…

People are equally divided between

• having a strict no food policy while they are learning online and
• being lenient on yourself and allowing you to eat and drink something light while learning online.

Not many people have their dinners during online courses (as it can get messy) – like trying to interact with your computer while eating!

7. Do you prefer to learn on Weekdays or Weekends?

I wanted to know if students of an online course want to learn on the weekdays, or the weekends. This helps me understand my customer from their shoes.

Surprisingly, while it might look like weekends are great for learning, people want to learn through the week, irrespective of the day.

Learning needs to be a daily habit. I like to learn something new on an everyday basis. We are in a knowledge economy, and knowledge, wisdom, data and skill are the most important assets we have.

8. What time do people learn on weekends?

People ideally like to spend 2-3 hours a day on learning something new (on average).

While it is difficult to spend time during the week, weekends can make up for it. I was wondering, at what time do people learn during the weekends. And if I am organizing an online webinar, when should I do it for maximum attendance?

Most of the students prefer Sunday morning to learn. The next best option is Saturday night (not evening). And the 3rd option that people voted for is Saturday morning (which is not much).

So the learning starts from Saturday night, and can continue later on a Sunday morning.

Students have more mind space away from work and can invest quality time in consuming in-depth content from online courses.

9. At what time do you learn on the weekdays?

Since people like to learn both on weekdays and weekends, I wanted to know their timing pattern for learning online courses.

Over weekends, people prefer learning on a Saturday night, or a Sunday morning. When do they learn on weekdays?

During weekdays, people prefer to learn mostly during 9-10 pm. After their work day is done, after their dinner (or while having their dinner).

How would you as a trainer interact with your student, if you were at his home tutoring him/her at 9pm in the evening at their home? May be, just may be, the online course content will connect better with the student, because the trainer had an idea about their learning time zones.

10. Where do you learn from when you are at your home?

I was a little bit hesitant to ask this question because it looks too personal. But any insights on how students learn from behind the screens is going to help.

I asked people where they learn from inside their home.

In a country like India, not everyone has a home office / study room. Even I don’t.

Most of the internet users in India who learn an online course from home, do it from their personal room (bedroom). Most of the bedrooms have a study desk, and that’s where they are learning from, if not relaxing on the bed (I hope).

11. How many hours per day can you invest in learning?

I was wondering, how many hours per day can people spend time on an average to learn new things?

If people are not ready to allocate enough time to learning, the future of online education might look bleak. But the results are positive…

People are ready to allocate at least 2-3 hours per day to learn something new.

The next cohort of people have said they can allocate 30 minutes to an hour, and rest of the people believe that they can allocate 1 to 1.5 hours.

People do feel that if they don’t learn something new on a daily basis, they will get out-dated with their career paths. There is a clear NEED for learning, and this demand is the foundation of the online education market.

12. Why do you prefer online courses over offline?

People like to learn from home and it is being proven by their repeated spending on online courses.

So I was wondering, why do people prefer an online course, compared to an offline course?

The number one reason why people want to learn from home is because it is convenient and there is no need to travel to an institute or a physical class room.

With most of the big cities becoming inefficient with inter-city transport systems in India, online education becomes the preferred choice so as not to waste time and energy during travel.

The next best reason for purchasing online courses is to build a library of learning resources that they can access any time. Online courses have unlimited shelf life and people can review the content whenever they want to.

13. Why do you prefer offline training?

Offline training has always been here, and always will be there. Offline education has too many advantages to become obsolete.

So I was wondering, what are the top reasons why people would still prefer offline training than online training. What are the benefits of offline training that online training misses?

The number one reason why people prefer offline training over online training is that they are able to interact with the trainer directly. They can ask questions and get answers in real time. The effectiveness of the learning you get from a trainer from a face-to-face interaction can never be replaced by online training.

The next big reason includes commitment to learn. Putting yourself in a situation where dropping out of a course half way becomes difficult. When people sign up for offline training, they commit to learn, in a specified time frame. This has a higher chance of success than online courses.

So how do we make sure that online training comes close to the effectives of offline training? Here are some ideas:

• Make it easy for people to interact with the trainer and peers. Online groups, forums and other form of online communication should be designed for seamless interaction.
• Encourage and incentize people to finish the courses they have purchased. Gamification of online education courses could be a game changer.
• Get people to remember what they have learned through implementation. Design assignments and exercises that are not too intimidating, nor too boring.
• Penalize people who do not complete the courses and drop out. Penalization can be in the form of lack of incentization for non committed students.
• Give opportunity to the students to meet the trainer and their peers, in an offline setting at least for a few times through the during of the online course. This can be done via learning groups or clubs.

14. How do you showcase your knowledge and skills?

Online learning needs an ROI.

The returns come in the form of:

• increased business efficiency and growth for entrepreneurs,
• more opportunities and higher earnings for freelancers,
• and more jobs for people looking for full time employment.

Entrepreneurs might not need to showcase their expertise. Instead they use the learning to grow their business.

However, freelancers and employees need to tell the world about what they know and what they can do. They need to showcase their thought leadership and their projects.

I asked people this…

People prefer to showcase their expertise through a personal blog. For digital marketers, having a personal blog itself is a project on digital marketing that they can showcase.

For other professionals, a personal blog can be a great tool to tell the world about what they know and what they can do. And the next best way for people to showcase their expertise is their LinkedIn profile.

Resumes are dying, and employers do not value resumes anymore. A resume is not a good way to showcase your expertise. Projects, and showcasing projects through blogs and online profiles is what gets people hired.

Recap

If you are an online education company or an online trainer, there are the following things you need to keep in mind:

• Learning via Implementation: Projects are more important than certifications and resumes. People learn better via implementation. People can showcase themselves better via implementation. So your goal is to get people to implement and learn through results. Students want that and you need to give what your students want.
• Product Experience: People feel satisfied, productive and powerful after learning online courses. It has positive feelings associated with the process and it also produces the desired results. Online learning is here to stay.
• Learning Style: People do not always want to see their trainer on video. As long as they know who is the trainer, their teaching and training is more important than the video production quality and features.
• Video Length: The ideal length of an online training video is 10-15 minutes. Anything longer than that needs to be broken into two parts or three.
• Learning Time Zones: People prefer to learn on both weekdays and weekends equally. They like to spend 2-3 hours a day learning something from online courses. On weekends, they prefer to learn on a Saturday night, or a Sunday morning. During weekdays, they prefer to learn post 9pm. They learn from their personal room or study room.
• Online Vs. Offline: People prefer online courses because it is convenient to learn from home and there are no time limits to complete the course. People prefer offline courses because they can interact with the trainer and complete the learning in a specified time.. The best way for online education to compete with offline education is to get the features from offline education, into online education, as much as possible, without removing the benefits of online education.
• Projects & Skills Display: People like to display their skills via their implemented projects through their personal blog, or their LinkedIn profile. Resumes are dead. Projects help employers evaluate, and candidates to learn better.

Final Words

I hope this study helped you understand the state of online education in India.

The same results can apply to many other countries as well. Since my Facebook group is mostly made of people from India, I am being India specific here.

If you want to ask my audience some other question, you can leave it on the comments below. I will ask my audience and update this article.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/30mE4na

Digital marketing is not an easy subject. I have been in the digital marketing space for more than 10 years, and I am still learning new tools and new digital marketing tactics. However, with time, learning new tools becomes easy. Learning new concepts becomes easy.

As you spend a lot of years in Digital Marketing, you will end up realizing that the only way is to keep yourself updated and an expert is to keep learning new things. Your ability to learn new tools and new digital marketing tactics will improve as you understand the fundamentals better. This is not the hard part.

The longer I practice digital marketing, the more I get to the core fundamentals. And it has taken me 10 years to get to the core.

The hard part of digital marketing is to get to the core fundamental truth.

What is the core fundamental truth?

It’s about the user. It’s always about the user. You have to put the user, first.

Right now, I am writing this blog post on a WordPress content management system. After publishing the blog post, I will share it on social media channels. Then I will run an ad campaign for it. Then I will check my analytics to see the amount of traffic it has got. But this is not digital marketing.

None of these tools, stats and technology matters, if I forget that there is a real user behind the screen who will be interacting with my content.

I am talking about YOU.

I have to realize that I am talking to You, through the digital medium, and it is as good as me standing next to you, and talking to you.

When we meet people at parties, offices, streets, at home, we cannot ignore them. They are right in front of us. The way we behave with them is completely different.

Whether we are just talking to them, persuading them to buy something from us, or teaching them, we behave in a completely different manner, because they are right in front of us.

The best digital marketers in this world, take what they do online, to a level of efficiency of offline interaction. This is the hardest part to master. This makes you a true marketer.

A great marketer would write a sales email like he would do a sales pitch in person.

A YouTuber who gets millions of subscribers talks to the camera as if he is talking to a subscriber who is standing right in front of him.

Email marketers write email like a friend writes an email to a friend.

It is so easy to forget that the content we create, is for real people out there who are connecting with you via the internet and personal devices.

We often get caught up in the numbers. Analytics, stats, revenue, sales and so on. When we forget to put the user first, we become bad digital marketers.

That’s the hardest part about digital marketing, to constantly remember that there is a real flesh and blood human out there, for whom you are doing your marketing activity.

As you become a more experienced marketer, you will more often remember that everything that we do with digital marketing, is just a means to connect to real people.

The technology and the interface through which you connect to real people is not as important as the people itself. Technology is a means to an end. If you have mastered the technology, but forgot about the people, you are a failed digital marketer.

That’s why I recommend all my students to be more of digital MARKETERS, and less of DIGITAL marketers.

When you remember this truth more often…

• You will write copy that connects with people and gets them to transact with you.
• You will write blog posts that make people feel like you are just sitting next to them, and telling them an interesting story.
• As a YouTuber, you will develop a very strong fan base because you are connecting with your audience on a deep level. Your subscribers appreciate your authenticity. You are behaving the same way that you would behave if they had met you in person.
• As an email marketer, you will get very high open rates. People want to hear from you because they enjoy reading your content.
• As an analytics expert, you will be able to get better insights from data, because you are putting the user first. You remember that whatever you are doing is to serve real users, and the technology is just a means to do it. If you have great technology, but forget to serve the people, you are going to fail.
• As an app developer, you will be able to develop beautiful user interfaces because you are not looking at the app, but looking at how people will use the app.

Digital marketing works because people are on the internet.

Without people, your ad will get no clicks, your landing page will get no optins, your blog will have no readers, your emails will get no opens, and your videos will get no likes, comments or shares.

It’s a simple concept, but hard to master.

And as with everything in life, the simplest things are the hardest to master.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/306cjiF

I have been in the digital marketing field for more than 10 years. I have mostly specialized in designing and executing marketing funnels for B2B and B2C brands. To design a highly efficient marketing funnel, one needs a good command over paid advertising, marketing automation, copywriting and most importantly, SEO.

SEO and paid advertising helps me get more people at the top of my marketing funnel. I love paid advertising because it is targeted and scalable. I invest in paid advertising, as long as I am getting the ROI. However, paid advertising has one down side – you have to pay for the traffic. And you are not creating an asset that will bring traffic for a long time to come.

Creating content assets and attracting organic traffic from the search engines is one of the best ways to get target customers into the top of your marketing funnel. Investment in content and SEO gives long term disproportionate returns. As the saying goes, “You reap what you SEO.”

Having a strong content and SEO strategy also helps me identifying content and keywords that I can promote via paid advertising. I am also able to build high quality landing pages which get a high quality score in Google Ads because for ranking in the search engines, a high quality landing page is a must.

My first set of customers discovered me through organic search. The quality of the users who come from organic search is very high.

The above screenshot from my Google Analytics shows that for the past 30 days, my blog has been receiving 1000+ users a day from Organic Search, consistently. In fact, on Mondays and Tuesdays, it nearing 1200+ users a day.

Creating content to full fill the demand on search engine users has a high return on investment. Each piece of content that you create becomes as asset that brings returns over time. Even if you stop posting new articles in your blog for a while, you will notice that the traffic doesn’t disappear overnight.

You can see that over 40% of my blog’s traffic in the past 30 days has been from Organic Search, mostly from the Google search engine.

This is a healthy split for any website. I would recommend that at least 30% of the traffic should be from organic search for any web property.

In this article, let us have a look at all the things I have executed in the past 5 years to get my organic search traffic to this level. And the things I plan to do to increase my organic search traffic to 10,000+ users a day.

1. Start Early with a Good Domain Name

Domain names age like fine wine. The older the domain name is, the more authoritative it is. I registered my domain name DigitalDeepak.com in 2013, and since then I have been blogging 2-3 articles a month until now.

I started making revenue with DigitalDeepak only by 2016 when I launched my own courses. For nearly 4 years, I was constantly updating my blog with 2-3 articles a month consistently without any immediate return on investment.

A good domain name that is regularly updated with fresh content makes it a valuable web property, because it attracts high quality attention of the internet users who could potentially become your customers.

You will not be able to monetize the content until you build a product that you can sell it to your users. Once you have a product that your users want, you will be able to generate profits from your visitors, and reinvest the money back into content creation.

To grow traction for my content in the initial days of my blog, I shared my published articles on my LinkedIn profile, Twitter and Facebook. Then I created a Facebook Group for digital marketers and started sharing my articles with my followers in the group.

Once in a while, someone would link to my articles from a forum or a blog post. And these initial links were very important to help me get ranked for some of the keywords I was targeting. The domain authority and backlinks started building over time as I published more content, and started getting more traffic.

Building a web-property with a focus on SEO is like growing a tree. The best time to start a blog was 10 years back, the second best time is today. Do not underestimate the power of a few good articles on a domain name. They end up getting traffic and links over time.

If you are planning to start a project a few years down the line, start building your presence now. If you have already got a domain name, great. If you haven’t, register a new domain name, or purchase a premium domain name and start publishing content. Install Google Analytics and start tracking your traffic. Keep adding content regularly. Even one good article a month is going to matter a lot in the future.

Keep sharing all your articles on your social media handles. Get a few backlinks through PR and guest contributions. Links that are earned with good content early on can help you a lot in getting SEO traffic in the future.

2. Publish Authoritative & Research Based Articles

Everyone on the web has an opinion. Anyone can start a blog and talk about what they think about something.

Usually opinions do not get much traction on the web unless it is coming from a very authoritative personal brand and is very polarizing.

Mostly, opinions do not have much value. Anyone can disregard your opinion, copy your opinion and publish their own opinions on their blog. There is no need to refer to you, or link back to you.

However, if you publish authoritative, research based articles, people have to refer you when they talk about it. They will link back to the source. Even if your article doesn’t have numbers and data, it should have solid references on which you have built your assumptions. You can see that even this article has a lot of data backing up my claims.

You can see from the above Ahrefs screenshot that I have got 648 different linking domain names to my blog, and a total of 5,800 backlinks from all the domains combined.

And the total new domains linking to my blog has been on an exponential growth curve. The organic traffic value according to Ahrefs is more than $25,000 for the past 3 months. My web asset is giving me good returns in terms of quality traffic – which I would have to pay for if they did not come to my blog through search.

The more data backed posts I published, the more links I get. And the more links I get, better is my SEO.

One of the most linked to articles on my blog is an article on Drip Marketing. Even though I have written my thoughts and opinions on drip marketing, I have mentioned a lot of data from a lot of authoritative sources like Marketo, Marketing Sherpa, IBM, Gartner research, and so on.

Apart from my thoughts and opinions, I have added screenshots of actual data and what is happening behind the scenes. Such data is hard to argue with and naturally becomes authoritative.

When the content is well structured and appealing to the readers, it has a higher chance of earning backlinks naturally because people want to refer it to other people. There is no need to build backlinks for SEO, because you will be earning links, naturally.

To give you another example, check out this blog post: Do Digital Marketing Jobs Pay More Salary? Data Says Yes

The article is completely backed by data from various sources. I have not created the data myself, but since I have curated the data, the post becomes authoritative. By the way, I have also linked to the data sources that I got the data from. That’s the way we pay it forward in the blogosphere.

You can either curate data and add opinion to it, or you can create the data yourself. It is harder to create data, but once you have some followers, you can create new data through surveys and research.

I did a survey among my audience to find out the state of digital marketing talent in India. The post is made from the data that I have created myself through research. Such posts have a very high chance to earn backlinks.

This blog post is also based on data. I am showing you real numbers from my Analytics dashboard, and hence my opinion has more weight. If I had talked about the different ways you can improve your SEO without showing you the proof that I have already done it, you wouldn’t take my suggestions seriously. I am not giving you my opinion. I am giving you facts. You can ignore opinion. You can’t ignore facts.

3. Optimize for Reader’s Experience and Page Load Speed

When your website users are reading content on your pages, it has to be a pleasant experience. This means that the page should have good design, good layout, good content, and more importantly, the page should load fast enough so that your website visitors do not bounce off in the first second or two after waiting.

A page with hardly any content will probably get a very high score in the page speed test, but we need to provide people with good content as well. A functional website like Google.com where the first step is to search for something can have a very high page load speed. We need to strike a balance between content and page load speed.

There are three tools that I frequently use to check the performance of my website in terms of page load speed. They are:

• PageSpeed Insights by Google
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• GTMetrix Page Speed Performance Analyzer

Out of the above three tools, the most important score to consider is PageSpeed Insights.

I recommend having a score of 70+ in PageSpeed to make sure that your website is optimized well for SEO.

If you are using WordPress, the theme should be light weight and should be able to load fast on the website.

Whenever I upload images, I make sure I compress them before uploading. I use TinyPNG.com to compress the images and the images usually come down to 1/3rd of its original size.

I also use WPX Hosting, which is one of the best managed WordPress hosting companies out there. WPX Hosting takes page load speeds for SEO very seriously and the founder is a veteran SEO expert himself.

4. Long-tail Content Strategy for SEO

A website’s traffic is almost never to the homepage alone. Most of the traffic comes to internal content pages directly from search and links from other websites. This is the power of long tail.

If you rank different pages for a lot of long tail keywords, you will be able to have some traffic for each of the pages targeting a different set of keywords. All the pages combined will help you increase the traffic to your website.

If I login into my Google search console, I can see that I’ve got more than 70,000 clicks for free from Google search for free in the past 3 months.

All the clicks are earned by different internal pages. If you look at the top pages that are driving traffic to my blog, you can see that some pages get even more traffic than the homepage.

Each of these pages target a different set of keywords and get traffic from the people searching for those keywords.

Short-tail keywords are in general harder to rank because the competition for such keywords is very high.

If you target long tail keywords, the search volume for each of these keywords will be lesser than their short-tail keywords, but you will be able to rank easier, because the competition is very less.

I have tried to target both short tail keywords and long tail keywords and my return on investment on creating long tail keywords has been very high.

For example,

• the keyword “digital marketing” is a very short tail keyword. It is very hard to rank for it.
• “digital marketing courses” is a medium tail keyword.
• “digital marketing courses in india” is a long tail keyword.
• “digital marketing courses in mumbai” is a long tail keyword will lesser competition

I would be very happy if I can rank No.1 for “digital marketing” but that day is very far away. There are a lot of websites with a lot more backlinks than me ranking for that keyword. It will be very difficult, if not impossible to rank on top for such a short tail keyword.

I want to target medium tail keywords like “digital marketing courses”, but I cannot rank for them on the top 10 easily. I need more time and more domain authority before I can do that. But it is definitely easier than trying to tank for 2 word keywords.

I rank on the top 5 results for the keyword “digital marketing courses in india” but since I am not ranking No.1 or No.2, I am not getting THAT much traffic.

I rank No.2 for the keyword “digital marketing courses in mumbai” and it gets me a LOT of traffic. High quality, targeted traffic that can potentially convert into customers and students of my online digital marketing courses. That’s a good return on investment to have on the content created.

My page that is ranking for “digital marketing courses” has got 7,600 clicks in the past 3 months. The page that ranks for “digital marketing courses in mumbai” has got 4808 clicks. That’s almost 60% of the traffic from the medium tail keyword.

So now, the total traffic I can get for targeting all the following keywords will be much more than what I can get for “digital marketing courses”.

I can target keywords like:

• “digital marketing courses in mumbai”
• “digital marketing courses in bangalore”
• “digital marketing courses in chennai”
• “digital marketing courses in delhi”
• and more…

I can publish one article each for each of the medium-tail keywords and rank No.1 easily for all those keywords – because the competition for long tail keywords is very less.

Discovering Long Tail Keywords

To find out long tail keywords, the easiest way is to use Google’s auto suggest.

If you go to Google.com and type in 3-4 words, Google will auto suggest long tail keywords. If I search for “digital marketing courses in” Google will auto populate the top words that are being searched after these 4 words.

Even better, I would search for “digital marketing courses in a” and then Google will auto suggest all the keywords that start with a.

I can then do another search like “digital marketing courses in b” and we will get more results of long tail keywords with the 5th word starting with b.

You also have to make sure that each of these keywords have descent search volume.

For example, I wouldn’t publish an article for “digital marketing courses in bangalore koramangala” yet because it is a very long tail keyword, and the investment in creation of content will not justify the ROI in traffic, yet. However, in the future, the search volume for specific keywords might go up, and when I rank for those keywords, I would get profitable traffic back to my blog.

Apart from Google’s auto suggest, there are many more ways to come up with keywords that you can target.

The top ways I come up with new keywords that have good search volume are:

• Google’s auto suggest
• Fetch keywords from Search Console. Target keywords that you have no targeted pages for but are ranking anyway. Target keywords that have very high impressions but no clicks.
• Run a Google Search Ad, and fetch keywords from the search term report.
• Use KeywordTool.io
• Use UberSuggest
• Use Ahrefs
• Use Moz

You can also find out new keywords by looking at what your competitors are ranking for. Many tools like Ahrefs will give you data about your competition.

Ahrefs collects data by crawling the web just like Google does. And they can find out what are the top pages on your competitor’s websites that are getting traffic from the search engines via long tail keywords.

For example, let’s take a look at the data from my competitor Sorav Jain. (He also happens to be my good friend).

I can see that he is getting a lot of traffic from long tail keywords.

I do not have pages targeting many of these keywords, yet.

When I invest in content creation for my blog, I can go after the low hanging fruits, discovered through competition research.

There are many interesting keywords in the above list which I did not think of earlier like…

• “top digital marketing agencies in India”
• “digital marketing quotes”

You can see the left most column as “RD”. RD means ranking difficulty. Higher the number, tougher it is to outrank them.

When certain pages have a lot of backlinks, the ranking difficulty goes up. For example, the keyword “sorav jain” has a very high ranking difficulty. And the number of backlinks he has for the home page URL with “sorav jain” as the anchor text is very high. There is no way I can rank DigitalDeepak.com for the keyword “sorav jain”. Neither do I want to. However, there are many other easier keyword opportunities.

A combination of keyword research tools, Google’s auto suggest, research on the competition’s traffic will give you enough keywords that you can target and rank for. Having a data-driven, keyword research based content strategy is the best way to increase organic search traffic in the long term.

As you keep building your site’s authority over time, you will keep earning new backlinks and that will lead to a higher domain authority. With high domain authority, you can rank for the long tail keywords even without having to build links to those pages separately.

Write for Your Readers

Having said all this, never write content for the sake of ranking in the search engines. Always write content for your readers and make sure that you are delivering value with your content. Without having a focus on giving value through content, you will never be able to attract backlinks and rank for these keywords.

If your content is not of good quality, search engines can easily find that out and lower your rankings. For example, if my article on “digital marketing courses” is not of good quality, someone who clicks on my website link and enters my page, would just click the back button and try some other result.

Google knows that this person has bounced back, and because of that, they know that your content quality is not that great. You will not be able to have a high enough ranking to attract enough clicks from the searches for that particular keyword.

You need to be data driven in finding out the demand for content through proper keyword research. Once you have finalized on the keywords that you want to target, write articles for readers that they can read and gain value from. Without adding value through content for your readers, you will never build a strong personal brand.

Talking about personal brands, let’s have a look at the most important SEO and content marketing strategy that most people often ignore, or even forget about…

5. Grow Your Personal Brand and Authority

It doesn’t matter if the website is a personal blog or a brand’s website. The people who create content are people end of the day, and readers want to read from real people. The personal brand and authority of the author matters a lot when it comes to the perceived value of the content.

This blog DigitalDeepak.com has almost all the articles published by me.

You are reading these blog posts not because it is published on DigitalDeepak.com, but because it is written by me. You would be equally interested in what I have to say if I had delivered the same article as an ebook, or if I had published this article on some other website.

You do not care about the website – DigitalDeepak.com. You are paying attention because of who I am and what I want to say. That’s why it is important to focus on personal branding and growing authority. This is part of your SEO strategy.

A while back, Google introduced something called Authorship, where you had to link your author profile to the article that you have written, and Google would show your author profile picture next to the search results. As of now, the authorship snippet doesn’t exist anymore.

When Google had launched authorship, another important keyword made rounds in the SEO space – Author Rank.

Author rank is an idea that Google will be using the data it collects from the web to rank individual authors based on their expertise. It is still a hypothesis, and it is not yet proved that Google has some data point called author rank, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t focus on building your personal brand.

Even if Google is not trying to rank authors according to their expertise level, you are still going to have a lot of incoming traffic to your blog through brand searches. I get 1000s of clicks per month to my blog with the search term “deepak kanakaraju”. This is because of personal branding and word of mouth marketing.

Here are the different methods that I follow to grow my personal brand and possibly my “author rank”.

• Publishing books in my name
• Gave a talk on the TEDx platform
• I give talks at events and conferences whenever possible
• Add useful videos to my YouTube channel
• Participate in interviews and podcasts when people invite me
• Guest post on authority publications like Entrepreneur.com and YourStory
• Contribute articles to fellow bloggers in my industry
• Conduct AMA sessions on Facebook Groups and Forums
• Post small bits of ideas, inspiration and thoughts across all my social media channels
• Answer people’s questions on Quora, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn groups and niche forums.
• Conduct webinars and participate in other people’s webinars.

When you are perceived as an expert in your industry, people will not hesitate to link to you, quote you and invite you for sharing your thoughts on their platform. Building authority and expertise on a subject is a side effect of wanting to learn, grow and help other people learn new skills & get new opportunities.

I already seem to have good search volume for the keyword “deepak kanakaraju”. Google even suggests words for my keyword. This is a side effect of the value I have created with my content.

When you become a known personal brand and position yourself as an authority in a specific subject, you will find it easier to get clients, get job offers, and find it easier to convert your blog readers into customers.

Your preeminence will help you increase your conversion ratios across all the stages of your funnel.

Use Your Personal Brand to Grow a Brand

Your personal brand and authority will then rub off on the brands that you have created and make it a valuable brand.

For example, Steve Job’s personal brand got rubbed off on Apple, Elon Musk’s personal brand rubs off on Tesla and SpaceX, Rand Fishkin’s personal brand rubs off on Moz.com. Over time, the brand(s) that you have created will become preeminent by themselves.

Your personal brand can be used to increase the preeminence of the brands that you create, but in turn, the brands that you create, can rub off their preeminence on other associated personal brands as well.

For example, I have positioned myself as an expert in Digital Marketing. My performance marketing company – PixelTrack also becomes preeminent because of me. My co-founder of PixelTrack, Sanjay Shenoy builds his personal brand through me, through PixelTrack and becomes preeminent.

When people talk about SEO, they get lost in the technical terms. Yes, backlinks, on-page SEO, keyword research etc. are important but the most important of it all is to build a brand.

A strong brand will naturally benefit SEO in every possible way. Google will reward brand mentions and sites with a lot of brand searches. People will not hesitate to link to a well-known brand. People will be more likely to click on a well-known and trustworthy brand on the search results and social media feeds than other brands.

For example, if you see an ad for the latest Search Advertising Tips on your Facebook Feed from two different people, one is someone that you do not know, and the other person is DigitalDeepak, which ad are you more likely to click on? My ad of course. Because you have heard about me before and you are confident about the quality of the content I create. Even if the other ad performs better on a blind split test, I might be able to get a higher CTR just because of my brand recall.

Out of all the above 5 ways I’ve mentioned that helped me increase my organic traffic, building a brand is what has helped me the most in SEO. It might look counter-intuitive, but it’s the truth. You have to align your marketing and branding strategy to build trust among users and that’s all it takes to win in the SEO game.

Final Words

I hope this detailed case study has helped you get insights into my SEO strategy. This is the same strategy that we follow for all the clients of PixelTrack. This is the same strategy that I teach in detail in my SEO mastery course.

I plan to follow the same strategy to get to 10,000+ users a day from organic search. And I hope I will achieve it within a few years. I will update this article when I get there.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below! I reply to every question.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/2JboyVS

Books are a great source of learning to master the fundamentals and basics of a subject. As I had mentioned in my recent blog post on how to learn new skills, mastering the fundamentals is very important for becoming an expert in a subject.

While I try to learn most of the latest updates in my industry by reading blogs and following the Twitter updates of the most important thought leaders in marketing – I learn the fundamentals from books. If I have created a brand for myself in the digital marketing space as an expert, I would attribute it to the authors who have shaped my career. I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

Here’s a list of top 7 books that I think every digital marketer should read. These are not the most common books that are in the lists of most articles. They are a bit tangential, and I believe that these books help you get a wider perspective on digital marketing.

1. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook – Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk, four-time New York Times bestselling author, is an early investor in companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Venmo, and Uber. With a full-service digital agency, VaynerMedia, he has assisted Fortune 500 companies in developing various digital and social media strategies.

The book highlights the art of winning the hearts of customers by mastering the skill of social media marketing. It provides the winning combination of right jabs and hooks for triggering an emotional response.

Gary points out how iconic brands produce poor-quality content without understanding the social media platforms. He advises marketers to respect the platform and audience because people come with a different mindset on different platforms. With fewer right hooks and more jabs, he provides the blueprint for transforming followers into a brand loyalist.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook – Buy from Amazon India

2. Youtility – Jay Baer

Jay Baer, the owner of Convince & Convert Blog, is the marketing keynote speaker, digital marketing pioneer, and a host of Social Pros podcast. Since 1994, he has consulted more than 700+brands, including the Fortune 500 companies.

With Youtility, he breaks the traditional mindset of hype marketing. The book helps prospects make better decisions in the long-run. He advises businesses to adapt to the ever-changing marketing environment by building relationships with information.

The whole theme revolves around the idea of smart marketing with the aim of turning a one-time client into a long-term customer. With real-life corporate examples, he elaborates how consumers have the upper hand to filter out the hype-filled marketing.

Youtility – Buy from Amazon India

3. Epic Content Marketing – Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute, is a content marketing strategist and podcaster who organizes the content marketing event ‘Content Marketing World’ in North America. He is also known as the ‘Godfather of Content Marketing.’

In his book, Joe explains how to tell a different story by winning the heart of the audience with less marketing and clutter. He gives importance to the valuable content that consumers are eager to consume and share.

This 350+ page guide gives all the tools for creating and distributing the content by laying down the objectives, principles and core strategies in a simplified manner. The author urges companies to stop talking about themselves. He stresses on the idea of finding a real voice by sticking to the brand story for customer engagement.

Epic Content Marketing – Buy from Amazon India

4. Web Analytics 2.0 – Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik, the recipient of Statistical Advocate of the Year 2009, is the Analytics Evangelist for Google and a prominent speaker. In his book, he sheds light on the relevance of online data for business’ successful growth.

Companies spend a lot of time, effort and money in data collection. But, they don’t know how to convert that data into a profitable business. With the help of tactical strategies and execution models, Avinash presents the analytical framework in an easy-to-understand format.

The book will change your perception about analytics. It talks at length about actionable strategies for measuring social media and multimedia campaigns, data reconciliation, analytical techniques, explaining core matrices, and wealth of other information.

Web Analytics 2.0 – Buy from Amazon India

5. Permission Marketing – Seth Godin

Seth Godin, the founder of Yoyodyne and Squidoo, is the author of 18 books published in more than 35 languages. In 2013, he was admitted into the Digital Marketing Hall of Fame.

Permission Marketing, the marketing classic, helps marketers shape their message in accordance with customers’ willingness. He rejects the concept of ‘Interruption Marketing’ where companies sell the product by pushing the idea like a cheesy salesperson.

He shares practical strategies and case-studies for pulling the potential customers. This book emphasizes the need for treating permission as a privilege. With permission, comes the big responsibility to share relevant content with the audience. Four tests of Permission Marketing builds the firm foundation for trust and brand awareness.

Permission Marketing – Buy from Amazon India

6. The Art of SEO (3rd edition) – Eric Enge

Eric Enge, CEO, and founder of digital marketing agency Stone Temple Consulting is known for breaking new grounds and eliminating common myths in the search engine industry. Jessie, the founder of SEO agency Alchemist Media, is one of the original nine founders of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization). She was the first person to publicize the PPC click fraud in 2001.

Stephan, the founder of SEO agency Netconcepts, invented the automated pay-for-performance natural search technology platform ‘Organic Search Optimizer.’ His excellent command over SEO, productivity, and other online topics landed him over 100 speaking gigs around the globe.

The third edition equips the digital marketers with an updated list of SEO tools and search engine optimization methods. These three acknowledged experts have explored the inner workings of search engines in this 990+page guide. The readers get the glimpse of search and SEO industry future by understanding the effects of various algorithmic updates, tools for tracking results, and new dimensions in mobile, local and vertical SEO.

The Art of SEO – Buy from Amazon India

7. The New Rules of Marketing and PR – David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott’s long list of advisory clients includes Hubspot, a company he helped raising from a handful of clients to more than 30,000 customers in 90 countries with his sales and marketing strategies.

His book has been translated into 29 languages, and hundreds of universities and business schools have included it in their educational programs. The book offers a step-by-step strategy for increasing the visibility and sales by communicating with the buyers directly.

It offers resources for the entrepreneurs and business owners for building a strong marketing and PR strategy. This practical guide comes with fascinating case studies and detailed analysis for confidently market any product, service, or idea.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR – Buy from Amazon India

[Bonus] Hug Your Haters – Jay Bear

Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist of Canva and brand ambassador for Mercedes-Benz, believes this book to be the landmark in the history of customer service. Jay Bear’s deserves the second mention in my recommendation list because he has changed our perspective towards customer complaints.

He provides the solid framework of customer service by telling how to address private and public complaints, measure customer service, figure out the right time for responding customer complaint, and include specialized apps and new technologies to turn company’s problem into a valuable asset.

The book also covers inspiring and hilarious case studies to help readers understand how to hug their haters with speed, compassion, and humanity. If your customers are happy with your digital service, they refer your work. More referrals result in more opportunities. More opportunities increase your skills and bank balance.

Hug Your Haters – Buy from Amazon India

Conclusion

All the books will help you give new insights into the digital marketing industry, and help you master the fundamentals. More importantly, these books also inspire you and motivate you to grow in your career.

However, if you want to learn new skills and become an expert, I recommend that you should learn by doing, and become an expert by teaching.

from Digital Deepak http://bit.ly/2VNf0X2