What to Do
First, you must be willing and open to learn new digital lessons no matter how experienced you already are. Next is to take concrete steps to enroll in free digital marketing boot camps and courses. These courses will provide you an excellent base knowledge of how the digital marketing industry functions in practical terms.
Here are some free resources that can be of help to you for a practical, hands-on knowledge that you really need to grow your digital marketing business.
Google Analytics Academy
You can hardly do any meaningful marketing business online without the aid of Google resources. Google Analytics Academy appears to be one of the best entry-level courses for digital marketers. From it, marketers learn how to collect/collate market data. Next is, how to analyze the data, and how to derive useful insights from it to help make useful decisions for business growth.
MOZ Academy
Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a hugely challenging marketing technicality for most marketers. This is why most marketers hire experts to do it for them. Without proper SEO on your website, getting organic traffic from search engines is near impossible. Having a working knowledge of SEO is helpful to all digital marketers. MOZ Academy helps to provide marketers a great crash course on the basics of SEO.
Ahref's Blogging for Business
Blogging is one very useful marketing strategy which most marketers now rely on to promote their businesses online. Ahref's Blogging for Business is an amazing resource for mastering the basics of blogging. You learn from it such skills as blogging for business-to-business, B2B, business-to-consumer, B2C, SEO keyword research skills and even copy-writing skills.
HubSpot Academy
HubSpot Academy provides short crash online courses, which generally take several hours to complete. It teaches all aspects of modern digital marketing skills/principles. These include email marketing, social media marketing, inbound sales, and content strategy design among others.
Hootsuite Academy
In Hootsuite Academy, you have access to a slate of free and paid certification courses depending on what you want. However, in this Academy, only the paid courses offer certifications. Courses available include, social media advertising, content marketing and social media strategy building among others.
Social Media Influencers
There are many free digital marketing lessons to learn if you search out and follow social media influencers in your industry. By entering industry keywords and phrases into the search boxes of popular social media platforms like, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. you can discover influencers and thinkers within your industry who have high engagement. These are the ones to follow. You will learn a lot by not just following them, but also taking very active part in their conversations.
Trusted Marketing Blogs
Marketing blogs are other free online resources you can learn from. These blogs are a great way to keep up on industry news. You have free access to digital marketing industry news if you follow trusted marketing blogs and online news websites. It is advisable to diligently, shop around to find out which platform provides the most insights for your specific business niche. Some expert marketers recommend trusted marketing blogs from Search Engine Land, Moz Blog, Content Marketing Institute and Search Engine Journal among others as very useful digital resources.