Did you get to play the stock market game when you were in school? If so, you probably learned something about how to analyze companies, pick stocks, and balance a portfolio. But I'm willing to bet that you would have learned more if you were given real money to play with and were told you could keep what was left of it after a set time. Changing the stakes would likely change your interest in the game.
Along this same line, I'm surprised at how many people will pay big bucks to learn about online advertising rather than simply giving it a try.
For example, one credit at a state run grad school appears to run around $1000 these days. In many cases, I think you could learn more about online advertising if you took $1000 of your own money and spent it on Google AdWords.
Ed's 30-Day Fast Course on Online Advertising
What you'll learn:
1. How to set up a Google AdWords Account
2. How to create a campaign
3. How to target specific regions
4. How to set day parts
5. How to select keywords
6. How to select negative keywords
7. How to use advanced matching options such as phrase and exact.
8. How to write ads
9. How to improve ads over time.
10. How to track conversions.
How will you be able to learn all of that in 30 days? By putting $1000 of your own money at risk. All of the information you need to learn how to do the above steps is publicly available. And now you have the incentive you've needed to get serious and dig in.
Here is how to do it:
Pick a product to advertise by signing up as an Amazon affiliate or at cj.com.
Then buy ads on Google AdWords to market the product you've selected.
Track your returns over the month.
By the end of the month, unless things go terribly wrong, some off your $1000 in spending will be offset by affiliate earnings. If you catch on quickly, you may actually turn a profit. If that happens, you've just added a new income stream to your household. Congratulations.
Now sit back and think about how you could apply your new-found knowledge to other industries.
To me, this is a small bet. You're risking up to $1000 to really learn how online advertising works in the real world. That is valuable stuff.
1. Posted by: Rolv Heggenhougen on November 25, 2008 3:35 PM:
Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.