The rise of business technology has done 2 crucial things for digital marketing. First, digital marketing is more accessible to entrepreneurs thanks to new platforms and more affordable services. Second, there has been a corresponding increase in the paid and free online marketing courses that provide the education you need to excel. Yes, this is truly the golden age of digital marketing.
Using a quality online course allows you to avoid pitfalls, refine your strategies, and expedite your success. These courses obviously don’t qualify as business accelerators since they don’t provide capital or investors. But they provide top-tier mentorship and ideas, making them more like “business accelerants,” as they take the spark of your ideas and build them into an impressive fire.
These benefits are essential, as you are striving for success and don’t have the time to sit around and learn with the traditional model. As Jesse Sumrak explains:
Entrepreneurs often wear all the business hats: CEO, marketer, salesperson, HR, designer, accountant, and so many more. Despite what it might look like from the outside looking in, you aren’t just born with all this knowledge—you have to learn it step by step. Once upon a time, that learning was solely through mentors, university classes, or 5-pound books. But not anymore. Today, you can learn just about any new skill or profession through online courses. You don’t need to find someone willing to share their secrets of success, apply to take a college class, or carry around an outdated brick-of-a-book on Facebook marketing techniques from 2012. Plus, you often don’t even need to spend a dime. That’s right—you can find free online courses jam-packed with the content you need to master new skills and get rolling.
If you want to build your brand and dominate in the digital world, there’s no better way than to leverage the prime learning opportunities provided by online courses. This explains why it’s become such a massive industry. In 2015, the eLearning market was worth about $165 billion. It’s projected to hit $247.46 billion by 2024 and then top $325 billion by 2025.
The Advantages of Free Online Marketing Courses
With a free course, you have the luxury of sampling the content before you need to open your wallet. Entrepreneurs from every major industry have compiled courses that provide proven strategies that you won’t find in a textbook. By enrolling in free online marketing courses, you’ll set the stage for discoveries that can make an immense impact on your business.
So if your eLearning budget is limited right now, free courses are an ideal option. Even if you have the resources to invest in a premium course, you might want to check out the free version first to ensure it’s compatible with your goals and learning style.
If the course turns out to be as good as you think it will be (and most of the reputable courses definitely meet or exceed expectations), you can then upgrade to the paid version to get access to even more training and resources.
Here is a handful of free courses that provide quality content and feature seasoned instructors:
How to Go From 0 to 500k+ Followers in 12 Months
Instagram is a vibrant platform that can attract new followers to your brand. More importantly, the Instagram Shopping feature allows you to monetize your content and improve sales.
But Instagram isn’t an ideal fit for every business. Foundr CEO Nathan Chan uses this popular course to help you identify whether you should invest your time and energy into the platform. As Amy Rigby explains about the course:
Before you sink hundreds of hours into a strategy that wasn’t made for your business type, Nathan recommends asking yourself, “What kind of business do you have?” He says Instagram is best suited for B2C (business to consumer) businesses with a visual product […] Businesses that would do well on Instagram include ecommerce products, cafes, restaurants, hair salons, teeth-whitening services (or any service business with a visual product or experience). If you can show the product or experience that your customers will get, then your business can do well on Instagram.
This course not only helps you identify whether Instagram will be a lucrative platform for your business but also shows you how to capitalize on its diverse opportunities.
For example, you’ll learn how to create a bio to drive website traffic, how to target your content to your audience, and how to make your content so engaging that users can’t stay away. Most importantly, you’ll learn the proprietary method that we used to build our following of more than half a million users from scratch in just one year.
How to Run Facebook Ads
Is your business currently using Facebook? If not, you probably need to reconsider your strategies. Often referred to as the “King of Social Media,” Facebook still dominates many audience segments. But there’s little value in just having an account on Facebook—you need to know how to leverage the platform to its fullest extent. Otherwise, you’ll never stand out from the roughly 60 million business pages currently hosted on Facebook.
Marketer Nick Shackelford has insider knowledge about Facebook from his days working for Apple, and he’s more than happy to share them in this course. Shackelford’s “algorithm proof” formula for creating ads that will get noticed and get results. Best of all, this formula can be used for any budget. So you can start small, then scale with the rising sales.
Additional insights include the process for creating a high-converting ad, easy modifications to improve your return on investment (ROI), methods for testing your ads prior to aggressive spending, and ad writing strategies for ecommerce businesses.
The Genius 10-Step Copywriting Framework
You can post all the Instagram and Facebook ads you want, but the results will always be muted if they aren’t well-written. You need to understand how to persuade the reader if you want to succeed as a digital marketer. And former Google insider Arman Assadi shows you how to elevate the words for ads, social posts, emails, product pages, landing pages, and more.
Assadi’s tips will help you craft copy that’s personalized and engaging. By honing your unique voice and targeting your messages, you’ll be able to stop your audience in their tracks.
“What people actually get excited about is when the voice is unique,” insists Assadi. “When it’s a voice that they haven’t connected with before.”
This course will show you how to uncover the unique elements of your voice and amplify them in all the right ways. And that authenticity will shine through in all your digital marketing efforts.
The Content Marketing Playbook Behind Millions in Organic Sales
Creating content is as much a science as it is an art form, and Eric Bandholz’s course highlights the nexus between the 2 elements. It’s something that he’s spent years refining by turning an initial $30 investment into a multi-million dollar ecommerce business.
This course provides numerous tools to qualify your digital marketing strategies. You’ll learn how to gauge how likely something is to go viral, how to use content within your sales funnel to improve profits, and even how to set up your content to make money while you sleep.
The Advantages of Premium Online Digital Marketing Courses
In business, time is money. So if you know there are certain skills and strategies you need to learn in order to thrive, there’s no need to fritter around. Seek out the best eLearning source as soon as possible and get the training you require.
This is the argument for the right paid course. The value they provide will far outweigh the enrollment fee, as the nominal investment sets you up for substantial returns.
Paid courses usually differ from free versions in a few crucial ways. First, they provide proprietary information that justifies the paywall. Second, they offer more examples and context. And, lastly, they deliver more resources to help you apply the learnings.
Here are 4 paid courses that you should consider if you want to improve your digital marketing and increase your profits:
How to Master YouTube Ads
Tommie Powers has spent tens of millions of dollars on YouTube ads. That fact alone doesn’t make him special, but the fact that he’s turned those investments into half a billion dollars in revenue for him and his clients certainly places him in elite company.
This YouTube course is designed to help you capitalize on a unique situation. And the sooner you take action, the better. As Powers explains:
If a business owner can crack YouTube ads right now, I believe it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s the chance to absolutely own their market, the same way those lucky people did when Google first launched Adwords way back in 2000. That’s where we are today. Will it be that way 2-3 years from now when more people jump on? Honestly it’s hard to say. But right now, it’s insane what just one good YouTube ad can do to quickly grow any business.
In the How to Master YouTube Ads course, you’ll learn the strategy Powers has used for his biggest wins, plus strategies for diversifying your ad spend and finding the ideal opportunities to go viral.
Advanced Email Marketing
Here’s another timely course that’s changing the way people view digital marketing. With more than 280 billion emails being sent daily, your opportunities to stand out are limited. The old way of creating emails simply won’t cut it in this new age of overwhelmed inboxes.
But Jimmy Kim is uniquely qualified to show you why email remains the #1 source for online revenue, and how you can steer more of that revenue into your own bank account. Recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on email marketing, Kim draws upon vast amounts of data to deliver the most impactful strategies.
More than 30,000 students have used Kim’s training to start and scale their own online businesses. If email marketing is a focus for your business this year, check out this course to see if it would be a worthy investment.
Blow Up Your Brand!
Depending on how you read the name of this course, it could either be a great thing or a really bad thing. Trust us—it’s a great thing. Instructor Eric Bandholz offers expert strategies for building your brand, creating breakthrough organic content, instructions on how to execute with precision, tips on how to build your community and using social media to dominate your industry.
At the heart of this premium course is the insight that everything you’ve been taught previously about content marketing is probably wrong. That’s a bold claim, but the course uses never-before-shared resources to lay out a unique way for taking your brand to new heights.
As mentioned earlier, there are often free and paid versions of the same course. Bandholz is the instructor for a complimentary Content Marketing Playbook course and it provides many critical details that can benefit your business. But if content marketing is a priority for your business and you’re looking for an expert to share the proprietary information they’ve used to build their own multi-million dollar business, it’s worth every cent to invest in this upgraded version.
Rapid Course Formula
If you have your own expertise and skills to share, putting them all into an e-learning course of your own can be a powerful way to expand your brand. In this premier course from Foundr CEO Nathan Chan, you’ll learn how to create and launch the caliber of content that enabled us to attract more than 2.3 million Instagram followers and continues to bring more than 4 million people to our website each year.
It’s the perfect course for those who “have special skills or a unique message,” says Chan. “Our Rapid Course Formula gives you an in-depth roadmap that’s been perfected while creating more than 100 different courses and building an 8-figure company from scratch.”
Resources include validating your course topic, prescaling tour course, payment setup, partnering with experts to build your course, employing lead magnets, and Foundr’s proven 7-step course creation process. Once you’re ready to launch, Module 6 includes crafting your irresistible offer, leveraging social proof and testimonials, and using bonuses to sweeten the deal.
Choosing the Best Online Digital Marketing Courses
With so many free and paid digital marketing courses available, it’s important to have a strategy for narrowing down the options to identify your optimal selection. Start by asking these 6 questions:
- What business skills are my strongest?
- What business skills do I most need to develop?
- What areas of my business are strongest right now?
- What areas of my business are top priorities in the coming year?
- What is my preferred learning style?
- Am I willing to pay for my eLearning opportunity?
Your answers will steer you toward courses that provide expert insights into areas you need to develop and your business requires to succeed. And by matching the content to your own learning style and e-learning budget, you’ll be able to gain valuable skills in a hurry.
You can browse our complete selection of free courses by clicking below. Our instructors cover crucial topics such as launching a profitable store in just 12 weeks, figuring out your financing, increasing your profits, and negotiating with confidence. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be better positioned to take your business where you want to go and start earning the kind of profits you’ve only dreamed about.
