Why I decided to take the Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program?
“You should not be in my class if you think I am preparing you for employment.” I’ll never forget those words from one of my best Professors back in the University. Her words made more sense when she quit being our School of Social Sciences Dean to start her consulting firm. Keenly following her teachings brought me to a very interesting field — Social Media Management, somewhat close to what I studied in College — Public Relations. Since then, I can’t recall where I lost the thought of finding a PR job.
60% passion, 40% skills is my description of Social Media Management; passion to naturally connect with potential and existing clients and be helpful, and skills of best practices and tools to enable you succeed in your job. Being a freelance Social Media Manager for one of the big publishers of HBCU news, taught me that you need to be flexible and open to new tasks and never tire learning new skills. Two months working in Social Media, an opportunity came up for me to double as a Client Services Manager in charge of the company’s email inbox, that meant earning more since I get paid per hour of work done. The CEO was so kind to teach me the ins and outs of both Social Media and Email Management but nowadays he is a very busy man.
Currently, my role entails managing email inbox, social media publishing and scheduling, content creation and curation, and social media engagement. There are other tasks that are done by the CEO including but not limited to social media ads, email marketing and SEO which I believe I could be more helpful and earned more if I knew how to do them. I know you also get confused when you want to learn a certain skill online. How do you go about it and which is your best e-learning platform? Today I’ll share with you how I easily got started in Digital Marketing — you too can.
There are hundreds if not thousands of e-learning platforms to learn Digital Marketing, some are free e.g. Hubspot, SEMRush Academy, YouTube videos, Google Digital Skills for Africa etc. while others are paid for e.g. Udacity, Udemy, Coursera, FutureLearn, EdX, Pluralsight etc. Of all the platforms, Digital Marketing Nanodegree(DMND) Udacity program stood out for me. Its project-based learning experience, well-structured multimedia course materials which cover from foundations to best practices and course content developed in partnership with industry leaders in Digital Marketing tools including Google, Mailchimp, Facebook, Moz, Hootsuite and Hubspot make it the most competent course in everything Digital Marketing. In addition, you get support from experienced and knowledgeable mentors who guide you in your projects, review your projects within 24 hours, advice you how to revamp your LinkedIn profile and CV, and create a great portfolio to showcase to your clients.
