How To Get A Job In Digital Marketing With No Experience

Gaining hands on experience and SEO and PPC. This question comes in from Joseph, and Joseph says this isn't a question related to business, but instead about career in digital marketing, more precisely, paid search and MCO. I took an eight month online course in digital marketing. I've taken and passed the Google Analytics and Google ad certification course and now I'm in the process of finishing up data use PPC. Mastery Course in order to be more competitive in the job market. I'm doing all this while still sending out my resume for paid search MCO or digital marketing positions. I don't have a lot of hands on experience which I find as an obstacle in securing a position in digital marketing. What would you recommend that I do and how should I go about overcoming this obstacle? Thank you.

OK, so this is a classic chicken before the egg situation. People want you. They want to hire you for a job, but you don't quite have the experience you need. And you can't get experience if you don't have a job. Right. So that answer this question probably more than any other question I've answered over the years. When it comes to both career development and just in general breaking into the industry, I always answer the same way. If you're somebody who has a very large supply of time and a very limited amount of demand for your experience right now, then create experience that has a demand.

And the way you can do that is by giving away something for free, because if you have a supply and demand curve, meaning you have a lot of time available to get into this thing, and there's somebody who doesn't have a lot of demand for what you have because you don't have the experience they do have. There's a ton of demand out there for somebody who's willing to work for free or cheap or to work for experience. And so instead of exchanging for money, exchange for experience, get that under your belt and do as much as you can. Now, the next follow up question I get every time is, well, how do I do that?

Well, you know, there's a lot of companies that would have you work for them right now. There are you know, in the current global situation, restaurants would love to have you help with Internet marketing as much as you can to get them going. Anybody who's been a hit by the closing down of their physical location, who wants to figure out how to sell online, could use your experience right now. Anybody who any any organization like a religious organization where they can't people can't meet in person, they might want your help getting people online to do donations. You might want to have help with any funds they've received for any stimulus funds or any funds from Google or Facebook ads in order to to work things. So so you can talk to them.

You can lean on them and say, hey, you know what, I I actually really want to help you out. And I know I can help you apply for the nonprofit grant. I can help you navigate the situation. There's free money out there and I'll bring it to you. And I won't even ask for anything in return. I just want experience and I want you to be the first referral that I can use or the first first resource I can use or what we call like a first reference that I can use on my application for jobs. And then you get the experience hands on while you're working on it.

You know, the same for political organizations. That might be a little tough right now. You can do it for nonprofits. They definitely need your help right now. They need a lot of help because they might not be able to continue going in the way that they do things. They might not be able to help people as much. So there's lot of people who need help right now. And there's like people who need to spend advertising dollars in order to get themselves out from this thing and think differently. And they're paralyzed by fear or by not knowing the situation or not having the infrastructure they need. And yet you have this infrastructure, you've taken these courses, you've taken my courses, other courses, you're certified. You have the knowledge that you need. You just don't have the application of it.

So it's a perfect inflection point where they need you and you need experience and so you can work on it. And it's forgivable, not just because of the global situation. You're doing good for people, but it's forgivable because I'd recommend this if there wasn't a terrible global situation right now. That's the way that you get experience. You need to be the chicken. You can't sit there waiting to be the egg waiting to hatch. You need to be the chicken. The chicken is always what comes first. That is the answer to the question. Chicken comes first and you need to be that chicken. Don't be a chicken and the other sense of being afraid of getting this part. Getting this experience. Be the chicken. Don't be the egg and you will get what you need.

There's a lot people who need your help. Help them. And, you know, you'll come out of this thing stronger. You come out of this with a good person to be your reference, and then you can go out there and get those jobs. And yeah, I know it sounds like it's gonna be forever. Honestly, I worked on an account for like a month before I had the confidence to go and tell people I needed to charge for it. And so it can you can get confidence within a month. Once you have some applications and once you see the dots connected, all you might need is that first experience to get there. So don't look at this thing is like a long term.

I'm never going to have the experience I need to do this forever to work for free. It usually is temporary and it's just to cement your academic knowledge with some kind of real world experience. And you can put that experience on your resumé and go out there and get the jobs that you're looking for. People are going to want your skills, but they do need to have some proof that you are going to be sticking with this for the long term. And that's your way of proving it is by helping somebody right now.