TL;DR
- Start with a Project: The best way to learn digital marketing is by applying your knowledge to a real project—ideally, a personal website or blog based on your interests or business idea. This hands-on approach helps embed your skills beyond theory.
- Build Your Website: Secure a domain, hosting, and set up your site (WordPress is recommended but the choice is ultimately yours). This becomes your testing ground for all digital marketing activities.
- Set Up Essential Tools: Install and configure key analytics and webmaster tools:
- Google Search Console (for search performance)
- Bing Webmaster Tools (for Bing search data)
- Google Tag Manager (for easy tag deployment)
- Google Analytics 4 (for user behaviour and traffic analysis)
These tools provide the data needed to measure your progress and inform your decisions.
- Develop a Strategy: Define what you want to achieve (your goals) and by when, using the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely). Write down your ideas and form a clear digital marketing strategy.
- Plan Your Tactics: Break down your strategy into actionable steps—these are your tactics. For example, targeting specific local markets or content types. Make sure each tactic is also SMART.
- Take Action and Iterate: Use your tools to monitor progress, analyse data, and adjust your tactics as needed. Digital marketing is cyclical: act, measure, evaluate, and refine your approach regularly.
- Decide Your Path: As you gain experience, consider whether you want to become a digital marketing generalist or specialise in areas like SEO, PPC, or social media. Focus on what you enjoy and what is in demand.
- Enjoy the Journey: Digital marketing is broad and always evolving. Stay curious, keep learning, and have fun as you grow your skills.
For personalised advice or professional help, I offer consultations, SEO audits, and retainer services.
Introduction
As a seasoned SEO professional I’m always looking for new projects to work on but today I’m going to go back to my roots and share how to get started in digital marketing.
Now this story was inspired by a lovely friend of mine who I’ve known for nearly 30 years, a talented graphic designer, who recently told me how she was on a digital marketing course. I asked her how she was putting her newly found digital marketing skills to good use. My philosophy is that you should “use it or lose it” and by that I mean that academic knowledge is one thing but to really embed skills, you absolutely must put your fresh new learnings to practical use.
And so here’s what I did when I was starting out and it’s of any use to anyone…
Have a Pet Project
When I first started thinking about designing websites back in 1997/1998 I needed something to “prime the pump” so to speak. I’d been lent a copy of HoTMetaL Pro by a colleague in the IT department at work but it was intimidating to have a fat instruction manual and a CD and I didn’t know where to start.
But then I went down to PC World as it was back in the day (Farnborough or Guildford, I can’t remember which one) and I picked up a copy of SAMS Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours. With a copy of this book, a 166Mhz Packard Bell desktop PC with 14” CRT monitor, and a free homepage from Demon Internet, I started my digital journey.
My first webpage was about my hobby at the time. I owned a 1986 Opel Manta GT/E and I decided that this classic car was going to be the subject of my little corner of the web. GeoCities was big around this time as was MySpace, so personal webpages were really becoming a big thing. This was my first time on the world wide web so it was a black webpage with constellation backgrounds and tech-looking OCR-A fonts, a “webring” code and that first step into digital marketing… the hit counter! I was obsessed with getting hitcount up and so my journey began.
To cut a long story short, I then brought a domain name, purchased some webserver space, and started to build out a website dedicated to all things Opel Manta. There were pages about my cars, featured vehicles of friends, sections on books, models, car insurance, and a gallery of all the shows I went to. I even monetised the new .com website with Google AdSense and made a few bob every month.
This was when I realised that if I scaled up the content I might earn 10 times or 20 times the pocket money I was getting. In fact, if it did scale one hundred fold, I could have quit my day job at the time.
Starting a Studio
With one website under my belt, I quickly earned a reputation for being a “web designer” even with just one site to my credit. I soon built a website for a karate club and then an alternative therapist. Now, with three websites to my name, I had a portfolio. But where to host that?
And so 22i Design was born. Named after the 2.2 litre fuel-injected engine in my now 1987 Manta GT/E Exclusive coupe, I had a graphics/website design studio/agency, three customers in my web design portfolio, and some of my artwork up from various bits of work I’d been squeezing in over the past couple of years (Logo design, digital photography etc.)
The Opel Manta site and 22i Design websites are both still live, but haven’t had the attention they’ve deserved for years, so they’re both in need of a rebuild – one’s been up for 27 years, the other 25 years.
If you need a place to practice digital marketing then setting up a website is the perfect vehicle, pardon the pun, for doing so.
So What Should You Do?
Your Website
Whether you have a blog idea, a project, a hobby, or a business, set up a website. These days you can buy a domain, get webspace thrown in, an email address too, and even have the tools to build a website via AI, from a drag-and-drop proprietary system, or go the “old-fashioned” route, and set up a CMS (I’ll always say WordPress)
Whichever route you take is not the purpose of this post, but this is where you’ll be applying your digital marketing.
Set Up The Tools
The next most fundamental step is to set up the right tools on your website Once you have all these created, installed, and running properly, you will be able to collect all the data that you need to be able to go about doing digital marketing.
At this stage you may feel a little overwhelmed if you’ve not used them before, but get them up and running and then take your time to learn them.
The tools I suggest you set up are:
- Google Search Console (GSC): Set this up for your domain if it’s always going to be one website, or use the exact URL if it’s the first of many and you have ans for subdomains. GSC is the tool that, once up and running, gives you all the information you need about how your website is performing in Google Search. That is, all the info right up until up you get a click, a visit. After that, Google Analytics takes over, but GSC is vital for showing you performance (Impressions, clicks, CTR, and rank), submit your XML sitemaps, and monitor which countries, device types are getting you clicks (or not) and whether your pages are being crawled and indexed. GSC is the basis for all things digital marketing, so get it set up and running ASAP and then pivot to be patient as the data rolls in.
- Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT): This is Microsoft’s equivalent of GSC. Afterall, GSC used to be Google Webmaster Tools, so this is for the Bing search engine. Whilst Bing doesn’t have as much reach as Google, it’s well worth setting this up and it has slightly different tools anyway. They’re complementary too, so you’ll see how your website performs on both Google and Bing, and there are some unique approaches from Microsoft that are useful additions to your digital marketing toolbox.
- Google Tag Manager (GTM): So that’s three tools before I’ve even gotten to Google Analytics. But I recommend GTM because once it’s in place, then you can add GA4 and any other tools that require tags to deploy. GTM allows you to add tags to your website without having to access your website, whether that’s because it’s a WordPress website where you have to modify header.php files (Which can be technical if you’ve not done it before) or there’s a convoluted process involving development, staging, and production suite versions or even code repositories such as Git repos. GTM bypasses all this hassle in one interface.
- Google Analytics (GA4): Now in its fourth generation, GA is a really powerful toolbox. It’s not as straightforward as it used to be – it’s a bit like an IKEA flatpack kit but you can make whatever you want out of it. Granted, after a few years now it is starting to get some templates to help beginners, but GA is the tool that shows what users do when they land on your website; devices, screen sizes, operating systems, how long they stay for, and even which things they click on (Events such as form submissions, etc.) GA4 is as simple or as complicated as you make it, but learn the basics before anything.
These are the most basic tools you should have in place and they are a great starting point for any journey into digital marketing. They give you all the measurements about which queries get you an impression in the search engines, where you rank, and how many clicks you get.
These are all the foundational data you need to be able to measure and make decisions about what new content to add, how existing content can be adjusted, and what your audience are looking for. Even how they’re reacting to what you have already.
This data will help you make decisions going forward, so take is one step at a time and immerse yourself in your website, your content, and the user data and their behaviour.
If you want to go a little further you can then start adding tools such as Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity to see how users scroll and click on your actual pages. Then add pixels for any social media platforms you may have too. LinkedIn is good for B2B, and then the Meta and Twitter pixels are useful too, if you have an existing or future audience in those places.
The Tools Are in Place: How Do I Do Digital Marketing?
I said I’d get you started, so with all the tools at your disposal, this is how you get started:
Think About Your Strategy
Whether you’ve decided to set up a hobby website or a studio, like I did, or you’ve taken the big leap and put your business online, it’s important that you think about where you want to go and what you want to achieve. Write down all your ideas and then combine them into a business strategy and a marketing/digital marketing strategy. Even if you’re “only” pursuing a personal path, it’s a great habit to condition your mind to. Practice makes perfect ad you’ll be able to develop marketing strategies with ease,
Your strategy is what you want to achieve and by when. In between are all the steps you will need to take to make that dream a reality. So if you want to be the top consultant in the SERPs in Surrey within twelve months, your strategy will detail all the things you need to do to achieve this. Thinking bigger is good, so a 3 and 5 year strategy are also beneficial here; how about a goal of being the number on in the south of England?
Make your strategy fit around the SMART framework of having a strategy that is specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timely.
Think About Tactics
To some. tactics is a dirty word. But this is not the case – you need a digital strategy and you need tactics. If your aim is to be that top consultant in the county then you may wish to target all the towns in your county first – Guildford, Farnham, or Godalming could be covered, before you move on to Woking, Weybridge, or Virginia Water.
Whatever your digital strategy is, back it up with planned tactics. These are the individual games you need to win before winning the league so to speak.
Tactics should also follow the SMART system.
Action!
Get used to the tools, watch the data, look for patterns. See where you’re making progress on your strategy and where you’re not. Nurture the areas where you need a little boost and “go big” where it requires more.
Do some on-page SEO, conduct some technical SEO, add a new section to your website, develop some fresh new content around the keywords that are most popular or profitable, set up Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, boost the keywords that need an artificial “shot in the arm” until the SEO picks up, spread your message across appropriate social media channels, build a following…
Then go back to the tools, watch the data, look for patterns… again. Rinsing and repeating is using the SMART framework and making it SMARTER – E for evaluate, and R for re-evaluate. This is where you start to realise that digital marketing is a cyclical thing – whatever you do in a month, you need to assess your work at the end of the month, and this is where you start to develop a reporting mindset.
Find insights from what you learn in your reporting and develop existing tactics or build new ones…
How to Get Started in Digital Marketing Endnote
This piece is a very general introduction to getting into digital marketing. You need a project, a strategy, to set up the tools, and then watch, learn, and put your learnings into practice. It’s taken me 25 years to get to where I am today and digital marketing has evolved massively during that time.
It’s a mature industry now but there are still nuances and quirks. And digital marketing itself is such a broad church – SEO, PPC, social media, and video are key pillars, but then SEO itself is comprised of on-page, technical SEO, ecommerce and local SEO disciplines. So this may be the point at which you decide whether you want to be a generalist or a specialist. What are you most natural at? What is most valuable out in the world? Which digital marketing discipline do you enjoy the most?
Whichever path you choose, immerse yourself and learn, but most of all, have fun!
And if you need to discuss digital marketing strategies, tactics, or SEO and copywriting in particular, I’m here for a call. I can hep you with SEO audits, and if you need assistance my services can be secured in an SEO retainer where you get my skills onboard for as many hours per month as you need.
Call me on 01252 692 765 or leave a message via my contact form.