Thank God is Tuesday!
Monday was painful to begin with, one of my least favourite days of the week. But the sunshine, Yoga, a bit of guitar playing, GoT (what an emotional roller coaster episode 3 was!) and bedtime reading made the day better.
Instead of one super long post on things currently occupying my free time, I thought I’d be better to break it down and write for one at a time.
I’ll start with the free online Digital Marketing course offered by Google.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking into short courses on Digital Marketing. I love the web and I always wanted to find out more on how search engines and online marketing work, the difference between SEO and SEM and all these magical things happening behind my screen…
But I’m on a low budget for the next year or so, so I can repay my loan and be free to move on and try different things without any money worries. The last 6 months haven’t been easy, I really miss my credit card but I know it’s for the best. To sum up, I can’t really afford to take any paid course right now.
Anyway back to the subject!
I found a couple of free online courses on digital marketing on Lynda.com but I didn’t get the chance to check them out yet because I came across Google Digital Garage- https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage
I’ve never really heard of it before but I thought I’d give it a go, since I could get a Google certificate by the end of it. It’s for free afterall, so I had nothing to lose.
It consists of 23 topics, with each topic containing 2 to 7 video lessons. There is a short test at the end of each lesson and a multiple choice assessment at the end of each topic to test your knowledge. Each topic you complete you get a badge and when you collect all 23, there is a final assessment you need to pass to get their certificate.
If you fail any of the tests, it allows you to try again until you get it right.
The topics cover a range of internet marketing branches from search campaigns, e-commerce, analytic tools, social media, video ads, to local and international customer targeting.
It starts with the very basics, so you might not learn much in the first couple of topics covered, but you’ll definitely learn more than you ‘d expect by the end of it.
Some of the lessons include professionals talking about their experience on how they built their online presence which for me were the most interesting part of the whole course.
The presenters talk clearly but I found that they sometimes talk slower than you’d expect and they use their hands A LOT and for me that felt so unnatural- it feels like they were told to do it but in their effort to do so they went over the top- it became a bit irritating at times. It might just be me, have a look a couple of the lessons below and let me know what you think.
You have the option to read the transcript rather than watch the videos if you prefer. I did that for some lessons, when the hand movements became overwhelming and I couldn’t focus and watch anymore.
You can watch all the videos on Youtube but if you wish to get the certificate you will need to watch them through the Google Digital Garage website, so you can complete all the assessments.
It took me about 2 weeks to go through all the topics and took the final assessment last Sunday. I’m happy I passed at the first go, it gave me a sense of achievement.
There is a vast number of free online courses and I think this is one of the most decent ones. I think is a great Google initiative.
Google Digital Garage also runs training sessions and 1-to-1 mentoring (unfortunately not in Southampton). https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/f2f#/Training%20sessions and have a physical store in Sheffield where anyone can pop in for free face to face coaching.
If you just started your business, freelancing, struggling with getting traffic and/or converting it to customers or if you just fancy learning more about digital marketing I definitely recommend it.
Next post on Lynda.com
Have a lovely Tuesday afternoon.
Eleni
Lessons I learned after I turned 30 