How to start a Digital Marketing Agency

This is my story, how I started my own digital marketing agency from no money in hand.

The hard truth about Digital Marketing is that actually no one known what exactly it is.

Based on their experiences they call themselves Digital Marketing Experts. However, the fact is that whatever they say is not necessarily that it will work for you.

I have done more than 50 different courses on Digital Marketing from Industry giants with good money spent but when I applied it in real time it simply did not work for me. Isn’t strange?

What I realized that the person who actually earning good money from Online Marketing, why he is going to share the secrets.

It’s time to learn in a hard way and understand the concept of Digital Marketing and its application.

Step1: Learn and Do Research as much as you can

The fact is that no one going to teach you unless until you start learning and master the skill.

You need to spend good amount of time to learn and educate yourself and do lots of research to understand how it works.

Don’t spend a single penny buying Digital Marketing Courses, just spend time watching YouTube free videos. There are tons of videos posted by digital marketers.

You will learn something out of nothing and keep watching these videos for a month or two even more as long as you are not master the art of digital marketing.

Initially I spent lots of money buying courses but that did not help me a lot rather YouTube videos dd.

Moral of the story, educate yourself as much as you can and keep yourself up-to-date.

Step2: Create the Believe within Yourself

People or companies will pay you if you rank their website on top of the Google results.

You need to master this art of ranking a website to establish your online business and make good money.

Whatever you learned and understood from YouTube videos, its time to do experiment to ensure your understandings are correct.

First, you need to create that believe and confident within yourself if you are capable enough to manage your clients and deliver them what they want.

Customers will only pay you if you are going to deliver them the best results for which they have hired you.

Step3: My First Experiment – How to Rank a Website

Failure is the first step towards success. As much as you fail doing your passion the more you’re gonna learn.

No one taught me anything how to rank a website from scratch; all I learnt from my past paid courses are the stories, no practical guidance.

So I decided to create a website and rank it. Even I didn’t know how to build a website, YouTube taught me how to build website without knowing any html codes.

Within a week, I learned WordPress to build my first new website. I registered a domain name with Godaddy and took hosting services from HostGator.

Tips: Without Market Research, never register a domain name or create a website

Step4: Find Market Potential for Doing Business

Many of us today jump into Online Business without doing proper market analysis. Result of which you may end up with good amount of money invested without any results.

Market Research is the critical component of Digital Marketing. You need know if the market has the potential to do business, if people are going to buy your products or services, if good number of searches are happening each month consistently.

These data helps us to make a decision if the market is good for doing business.

In digital marketing terminology, its called “Keyword Research”.

There are many different free and paid tools are available for doing keyword research. But I will show you the free way of doing keyword research and finding the market potential.

Step5: Keyword Research using Free Tools

Paid Keyword Tools give in-depth information about the keyword whereas in free tools, you will get overall information about the keyword. In my view that’s more than enough if you are new to online marketing and don’t have more money to invest.

Let’s deep dive into it;

Google is the primary source of all the information that we are searching online. We will be using Google Search to find the profitable and easy to rank keywords.

Let’s say I want to do business in “Mobile Cases” and want to know how many searches are happening for this keyword and if it’s easy to rank this keyword.

Before we move further, you need to install a plugin called “Keyword Everywhere” in Google Chrome Browser.

Open Google Search Console and type “Mobile Cases” and hit enter to see results.

From search results, you can see there are 12,100 searches are happening each month for this keyword, Click Per Cost is $0.75 and competition is moderate-high.

Overall this keyword is little competitive and being a newbie you shouldn’t try this keyword to rank. Let’s see whatever the other alternatives for this keyword.

This keyword Everywhere tool also provides helpful information’s adjacent to the search results;

Looking at these results, you can check which the low competition keywords with good volume are. From the above search results, I can see that “Mobile Cover Designs handmade” keyword has decent volume and the competition also low. This can be the target keyword to start with but lets dig more and see if we can find more low competitive keywords.

Now let’s search this keyword “Mobile Cover Designs handmade” on Google Console and these keywords found.

There are number of low competition keywords now showing up. Repeat this process until you collect 100 keywords of this mobile case niche.

Within an hour you will have good number of keywords with good volume and easy to rank.

Step6: Register a Domain Name and Host Your First Website

Register a domain name relevant to your niche like bestmobilecases.com or designercases.com, something this, it will make it easy for people to get an idea about your nature of business and it will also help google to rank your website.

There are many domain name register company among theme Godaddy is more popular and their services are good.

After domain name registration you need space to host your website, you can either choose Godaddy or some other hosting companies like Hostgator, NameCheap. Compare the hosting plans and choose the hosting provider.

If your website is based on WordPress then you must choose linux plan with cPanel option. WordPress is very popular to setup a website instantly without knowing much about HTML Codes.

Go for WordPress website and choose Linux Plan

There are number of videos available on YouTube, how to setup a wordpress website within 10 minutes. Learn it and do it by yourself.

I bet you, its that easy you can setup your website within a day.

Step7: Develop SEO Optimized Content

Writing content requires good skills, not everyone can do it. Its good if you have the skills of writing good articles.

But we need SEO Optimized articles, what does it mean?

SEO Optimized means, the articles should be written in such a way that Google can understand it and it help to rank your website.

If you don’t know you can hire content writers and get the job done but try to allow yourself to learn how to write an SEO optimized articles.

If you practice daily it will take 2-3 months time to develop good contents. You should always try.

For next three months don’t do anything just write content and publish it on your website. Make it habit and publish weekly 4-5 articles on the Mobile Cases.

Try to use all the keywords, which you have collected on keyword research phase. Ensure your target keyword is listed on Title, Heading and Body of the article.

Step8: On-Page Optimization Process

There are number of offerings in Digital Marketing, out of which SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Service is most popular.

SEO is the process of ranking a website on Search Engines. It has two components i.e. On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO deals with optimizing the content and website to ensure google understand your website and its content well. That helps in ranking

Whereas Off-Page SEO deals with promoting your website in different websites to create references, which is known as BackLinks.

In On-Page Optimization Process, we ensure website meta tag is well optimized according to the target keywords, content title, heading, body, image and video is well optimized as per Google defined policies.

Also we need to ensure the website has Privacy Policy, Terms and Condition and Contact Page.

These are the basic things which need to be taken care of on On-Page Optimization Process.

Step9: Off-Page Optimization Process

As I said earlier, it’s the process of creating backlinks from good websites. Only doing On-Page Optimization will not rank your website on Google.

Every month you have to create backlinks from very good websites. There are many different ways you can do it.

The popular ones are comment backlinks, Web 2.0 Backlinks, Social Bookmarking, Guest Posting, Broken Link Building, Press Release, Forum Posting, etc.

You must try all these to experience how it work and if you are getting any ranking improvements.

As this the first project, you must record each and everything that you are doing to rank the website. In future you need to do better to make your customers happy.

Unless you experience the good and bad, you will never feel the confidence.

Step10: Register with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools give you the technical information, which help you to improvise your website to hold better positions.

Google Analytics Tools will help you to understand how many users are visiting daily to your website, demographics data, location data, bouncing rate (how much time users spend time on your website), etc.

Google Webmaster Tools will help you to understand which are the keywords ranking on Google and if there are any issues identified by Google. These information’s will help you to address the issues and fix it asap.

These are the free tools from Google, which you never ignore it. It’s very critical for any online business.

Step11: Three Months Latter, Is your website ranking?

If you follow these guidelines, more than 80% of your keywords will be ranking on Google. This I have already tested it.

If you are able to rank a website that will make you happy and gives enormous motivation to move further and accept challenging keywords to rank.

Digital Marketing is completely a on-going learning process, it never ends. The more you learn and research the more you gonna get it.

And record everything how you rank a website, what was your strategy, how many backlinks you build to rank a website, how much time you spend, etc

These are the data, which helps to define your Digital Marketing Service cost that you are going to charge to your customers.

Conclusion

Starting a Digital Marketing Agency is very simple but not easy. First you need to educate and prove yourself before you helping someone else. It’s an on-going learning process, where you learn, educate yourself and deliver it. Hope this article may help you for starting your own Digital Marketing Venture.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.