My guess if you are reading this you might feel just like I did a few months back. I was stuck maintaining legacy software.
I was tired of building the CEO’s product instead of my own ideas and having a hard time selling mine.
The team is great, don’t take it the wrong way, I just was tired of building the same thing at every company I have been at.
Have you ever dreamed of quitting your job and working remotely? I did and I had just started a new job.
If this sounds like anything you might be feeling and want as well then let me show you how you can get an unfair advantage.
You see, as a programmer, I can build any system and automate it, but when it comes to sales and driving traffic to it (Digital Marketing), I didn’t really know how. I have played around with it and even tried a few things over the years but failed.
See I just turned 40 last month and I was in a not so good place about it. So I finally started to do something about it and start to research a way to change it. That is when I found Digital Marketing.
At first, it was hard. I had to learn a few things, but once it clicked, I saw the light and a way OUT of the J.O.B. I have been in high gear ever since.
What is Digital Marketing?
Really digital marketing is just marketing but with digital products, but I am sure you got that.
The advantage of digital marketing over traditional is you can target your audience more. You can target your ads based on
… just people in a certain age group
… and/or on location and country
… and/or on interests they have
… and/or on books, they have read
… and/or on movies they have watched and liked
So you can spend zero dollars marketing to people that are unlikely to buy your product or service. You just have to find that ideal customer and market to them only.
You also can setup tools that are far more effective than showing the same ad over and over again like email lists and websites. These allow you to give away value for free to attract even more people to your product or service. Think blog, YouTube, etc…
How many times have you tried to start that blog but stopped because no one was reading it, besides your mom? ;) Ok well, that was me many times. Hi MOM, Love you.
The unfair advantage is most people that get into digital marketing have to learn to setup all these things themselves or hire a programmer to do it. As a programmer, you already know all of that or could pick it up much faster if you haven’t built a website or done tracking before.
If you have your own product or service then great but that takes a bunch of time to setup and build. Especially, if you are the only one working on it. So my guess is many of us have not had the time.
The nice thing is there is a way to make money with digital marking without building your own product or service and it is called affiliate marketing. This is where you promote and market someone else’s product and get paid a commission for the sale.
Many people make a living this way but it is always changing. This is another advantage as programmers we already know how fast the online world changes. It also weeds out the people unwilling to change because they only learned one way to do it.
Warning: affiliate marketing is the source of many “get rich quick” schemes as well. Just so you know there is no one money making machine that is going to spit out thousands of dollars monthly with little effort. So don’t fall for that.
It is not that easy and most of those guys are selling old ways that don’t work anymore. If you want training, make sure they have live training at least monthly and their videos get updated when things change as things change quickly.
Also, know there are many big sites making great revenue by sending people to Amazon affiliate links and making 4 to 8% commission on anything that persons buys on Amazon in the next 24 hours. So it is a legitimate way to make money online. You just have to have a bunch of traffic to do it.
There is an affiliate or referral program for almost anything you want and any industry so the sky’s the limit here on what you choose to focus on.
Why Should I Learn Digital Marketing?
I see it like this. We already know programming, which puts us at the top 5% of salaries in most countries and locations. So if you can learn two highly valuable skills you are only going to drive that higher.
With marketing, there really is no limit to the amount you can make or automate depending on what you want out of life.
I want to build cool things and learn new things but I have little time to do either as most of my creativity ends up being at work solving some issue that if we could just rebuild some parts wouldn’t be an issue.
You do have to ask are you willing to learn something totally new. This isn’t like learning a new programming language or framework. It has been a huge mind shift for me to learn marketing.
I have been programming professionally for 17 years and love it so it was hard for me to just decide to learn something totally new and be bad at it.
In the end, I want to build my own product, but I can’t do that and learn marketing at the same time. Affiliate marketing, once I have it up and running, will eventually allow me to quit my job and work only on what I want. At least most of the time.
I will get to work from home or from a beach in the Virgin Islands and spend more time with family and friends. Who wouldn’t want that!
Now it isn’t going to come without hard work at first!
Ultimately it is up to you. All I can say is if you put the time and effort in there is no limit to how much money you can make and the time freedom that gives you.
How do I get an unfair advantage as well?
Digital marketing might not be for you but I am sure there are many other things out there, that when combined with computer programming, would give you a huge advantage over other people in both careers, explore that!
I have met many marketers now that wish they could just go build a website and set up the systems without the help of a programmer, so it works both ways (Neville big copywriter is Learning Coding).
We live in an information age now. There is really no reason you can’t go learn something outside your current career path and become a double or triple threat.
Some great places to start (These are not sponsored and I making nothing by referring you):