Are you an entrepreneur struggling to build a brand for yourself / your organization?
Do you understand the importance of marketing for your business?
Are you striving hard trying out various methods to increase sales?
Are you a small business owner, without huge budgets to spend on marketing?
Well, if you have answered ‘Yes’ to any of the above, then you are in the right place and it will be worthwhile to read further.
Let me begin by sharing my experience of my foray into the world of digital marketing. Being a solopreneur, I was struggling with building a brand for myself. I was doing business, however, this was primarily through word of mouth referrals. I had this strong desire to scale up. I didn’t know-how. I didn’t understand marketing much. Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to grow up the ladder I need to get good at marketing. I started off by speaking to more and more people to understand how it works, reading articles, and blogs on the subject. I had invested some money in digital marketing through a freelancer. However, when I didn’t see results for a few months, I stopped doing it altogether. This was primarily due to my lack of understanding. No action, no results. That was the case with me in this area.
I decided to get good at enhancing my understanding of marketing. With the world going digital, I realized that I need to know more about digital marketing. My understanding of social media was also poor. I had opened social media accounts on various platforms but rarely accessed it.
I decided to take it one step at a time. My search for a digital marketing mentor began. I wanted to focus more on the implementation rather than the theory part. I didn’t want to do a digital marketing certification program. As my major goal was to be self-sufficient in running my business. My son who was interested in pursuing a career in digital marketing had already enrolled for a certification program, however, I realized that it seemed too theoretical and the practical aspects were missing.
I had enrolled in a few online digital marketing courses. I had received access to Deepak Kanakaraju’s Digital Marketing Tools Mastery Course. I found that very informative and useful. That’s when I started attending a few of his webinars on various topics related to digital marketing. In one of his webinars, Deepak introduced the Digital Marketing Internship Program. This was a blessing in disguise for me and my son. I was looking for a program where I can implement it in my business and my son was looking for something where he can gain hands-on experience in the various areas of digital marketing. Initially, I thought of enrolling only my son as it was essential for his career. I took an intuitive decision to enroll myself as well, due to the structure of the program. The program was spread over a period of 12 weeks, with an assignment to be submitted every week. The icing on the cake was, that for every assignment that I submit, I get a cashback post the approval of my assignment. This was a no brainer for me to take the plunge and begin my journey into digital marketing.
Let me give you a brief, on my week-by-week learning that has helped me overcome the fear of venturing into unfamiliar territory.
Week 1 – Success Mindset – I was impressed by the importance that Deepak gave to the mindset. I personally work with people and help them gain the right mindset to achieve success in the areas that they wish to grow in. So it made sense to begin this journey as well by focusing on the mindset. The assignment for this week helped me gain clarity on my goals, strengthened my belief system, helped me connect with my personality and also connect with people who have a similar personality, my top peak performance states, what will I do to get myself into the peak performance states, the books that I plan to read in the next 1 year – I always believe in the phrase ‘Read to Lead’ and this activity reinforced my belief in reading. Week 1 was apt, to begin with, as I strongly advocate the importance of mindset to be successful in every area of your life.
Week 2 – The Law of Marketing – For a novice like me, this lesson was extremely useful to understand the basics of marketing. It helped me understand how the customers connect with the product or service and as a marketer how can you relate your product or service to the need of the customer. The assignment this week was to get into the flow of writing content. It paved the way for me to get into the space of blogging. The assignment was more about sharing your learning of this week in the form of an article. Click here to know more about my learning in week 2 and also share your comments too.
Week 3 – Niche Research – For you to be able to excel in any area, you need to narrow down and focus on it. This was emphasized by Deepak very beautifully. “Jack of all and master of none” won’t lead you anywhere. Hence, finding your niche, identifying, and connecting with your purpose is crucial as you are working towards your goals. This week’s assignment was segmented into 3 parts – to find your passion, identify your talent, and the market opportunity. Your niche is the area that overlaps all the 3. The next step was to do further research in your niche followed by creating your customer avatar. How would you connect with your ideal customer and what is it that your ideal customer is looking for? What is your market positioning and how would you like to name your digital product? These are few areas that this assignment helped gain clarity on. It was indeed useful as you had to give careful thought before you come up with your niche.
Week 4 – WordPress Blog – This week was a boon for a non-technical person like me. In this lesson, we learned about setting up the domain, hosting the blog, understand the settings for the blog, setting up the Google analytics and Google search console as well as how to link both of them. We also learned how to install plugins and the use of each of the plugins that we installed. This week was indeed a step further into the technical aspects and helped me understand the backend processes of a website.
Week 5 – Content Writing and Marketing – This week was all about presenting your content in a manner that engages your audience. So this week, I learned to write a blog as well as create video content. It is important to stay connected with your audience, so creating an editorial calendar to stay connected and follow through on your schedule is crucial. As in any business, it is important for you to be aware of your competitors and their marketing strategy. So we did some research on this. The best part was that Deepak showed us how we can do research on our competitors and learn from them too. We created a blueprint for our personal brand as well as our content empire that we intend to create. This included creating a framework for your book, which you may publish in the near future. Doing this assignment, helped me gain confidence that it is possible for me to create a marketing strategy for my brand. I can see my personal branding vision turn into a reality.
Week 6 – Social Media and Networking Mastery – Every business needs a network to flourish. As a business owner, you need to learn networking and get good at it. I have been a part of various networking organizations, however, that limited me to my local area. With a vision to scale up, I wanted to understand and learn how to do networking online. I had social media accounts, however, was not using them effectively. This week helped me conduct a live webinar and create a tribe on Whatsapp/Telegram. I also got an opportunity to update my social media profiles with my latest picture and also understood the importance of keeping it the same across all mediums. Creating a mission statement and knowing the purpose of the mission was an amazing experience. It’s important to have a tribe, however, you need to be clear with the principles on which you want to build the tribe. So, I worked on those principles as well. Overall, this week helped him to go deeper in creating a profit funnel and understand how conversions work.
Week 7 – Lead Generation and Email Marketing – Going a step further, this week helped to gain further insights into the tools and methods useful to generate B2B as well as B2C leads. In order to make your campaign effective, it is crucial that you get results. So this week, Deepak emphasized getting responses to our emails. This helped in making the implementation more effective, as we could see for ourselves that this works if done the right way. Nurturing our leads is equally important, hence designing the email sequence for staying connected with the leads is an important task that we had done this week.
Week 8 – Mastering Facebook Ads – I had used Facebook ads however didn’t know how to effectively use it to generate traffic to my website or leads for my business. In this week’s lesson, we learned how to set up a Facebook account and run ads through the account. So the tasks involved creating a Facebook Pixel, the ad for traffic campaign, creating a landing page and run conversion-optimized ads following which you link to a thank you page where the conversion is triggered. Understanding and setting up custom conversions for the ad. These were a few concepts I learnt to implement this week which helped me gain an in-depth understanding of how this works.
Week 9 – Mastering Google Ads – I had never used Google ads and had no clue about it. I felt overwhelmed when I first went through the video lesson. However, as I paid more attention to the details I gained confidence and understanding on how to implement this for my business. In this week, I learned to create a Google Ads account, create a Google conversion tracking code and deploy it on a webpage, create my first audience segment, create my search ad campaign, create a video ad inside the google ad, and create a smart display campaign inside the google ad. I will need to practice it to get good at it. This assignment, helped me overcome my initial fear of not being able to make any efforts towards marketing my business.
Week 10 – Search Engine Optimisation – This week we learned the nitty-gritty of doing SEO for the website as well as for a particular page on the site. How to use keywords to maximize the search, how to publish an SEO optimized blog and index it on google search, configuring Ahref’s webmaster tools for improving website SEO performance and increase traffic, doing a page speed test, get backlinks for the article that we have published, were few of the activities that we did during this week. The assignment helped me gain insights on how the online world of marketing works and what I can do to enhance my website ranking as well as increase traffic to my website.
Week 11 – Deep Marketing Automation – This week’s learning is really deep as the name suggests. It took my understanding of marketing to the next level. I mean for a person who started from scratch, I have come to a level where it doesn’t seem alien to me anymore. I need to practice to reach higher levels though. This week we learned how to create a Typeform to collect data from the leads, connect it with Convertkit which is an email marketing software, use Zapier which is an online automation tool to integrate all the apps for workflow automation. The highlight was to create an email using conditional content so that you are able to personalize the way you connect with your prospect. Setting up an Instamojo account for collecting payments for the products and creating a call to action funnel were a few important concepts that we learned during this week’s lesson.
Week 12 – Copywriting and Sales – I am yet to go through this week’s lesson. Once it’s released will update the learning here.
To summarise my learning of the DDIP, it was an enriching experience to go through these 12 weeks of implementation – yes, it was learning by doing right from the 1st week which makes this program stand out from the rest of the programs that are available in the market. The handholding that is provided by the Digital Deepak team is amazing and is definitely worth a mention. Other than the weekly lesson video, there’s a video that explains the assignment which is done by Deepak himself, as well as the Q & A session by his team member Kamna Jain. The step by step guidance along with the detailed checklist that is provided makes even the most difficult concept easy to implement. Since we are a part of the groups on telegram as well as WhatsApp there is also peer to peer interaction and learning that makes it more enjoyable. Teaching others is an effective way to retain knowledge and seal the learning for life. This program reinforces this method of Teach to Learn. The free courses that Deepak gives access to, during the course of this internship are like the cherry on the cake. This helps gain an in-depth understanding of the concepts and deepen the learning.
I did this program along with my son and this made it all the more fun for me as it helped strengthen my bond with him. As we were working on the assignments, we would follow-up with each other on the progress and give gentle reminders to submit the assignments on time. There were times when I was stuck with something and my son helped me out and vice versa. This was an added advantage for me in this program.
If you are an entrepreneur who doesn’t have enough resources to allocate for hiring a Digital Marketing expert, or a small business owner who wishes to understand how digital media works, or a novice who wants to make a career in Digital marketing, I would highly recommend the Digital Marketing Internship Program. It’s the best investment of your time and money. You can click here to enroll yourself for the next batch.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the DDIP team as well as the fellow interns who have been a part of my learning journey.
