A lot of people ask me, how can I make a career out of digital marketing? There are 3 ways. 1) Do Affiliate Marketing - Promote other pe...
A lot of people ask me, how can I make a career out of digital marketing?There are 3 ways.
1) Do Affiliate Marketing - Promote other people's products and earn revenue. 
2) Sell online courses - find out a niche and train people effectively 
3) Do freelancing, consulting, or start an agency - provide services in a niche. (Being an employee also comes into this). 
Or you can do a combination of all three.
To do any of the above successfully, you need to have a personal brand. 
You need to be recognized as an expert in a niche and then everything becomes easy. 
The biggest mistake people do is that they try to do one or more of the above without building their personal brand first. 
If you are not having a strong personal brand, no one will buy the products and services that you promote.
If you are not having a strong personal brand, no one would want to learn from you.
If you are not having a strong personal brand, no one would want to buy services from you.
Personal branding is the foundation for achieving success in Digital Marketing. 
You need to develop trust at scale, with the masses, not just one or two people. I call this "Mass Trust". 
So how can you go about building your personal brand?
Here's the framework.
CATT...
Content.
Attention.
Trust.
Transaction
If you want to build your personal brand as an expert in a niche, you need to first publish content.
Content
You can publish this content in your blog, YouTube Channel, Social Media, Podcasts, Books, Speaking events, Webinars, and so on. Without content, no one will pay you attention. You have nothing to show to people when they come to you.
Attention
The second one is getting attention. If you do not work on getting attention to your content, no one will come to your content (even if your content is amazing).
So how do you get attention to your content? You do SEO for your blog, run paid ads on Facebook or Google, Leverage referral marketing channels, use social media channels, and so on.
Now that you have got the content. You are getting attention. But what's next?
Trust
You need to build trust with your audience.
Just because you got their attention, people are not going to trust you. They come to your blog, like your Facebook post, watch your YouTube video, but they do not trust you enough to part you with their hard-earned money.
You build trust through engagement. This is where you get them to an email list and send messages on automation. You create a group and engage them in the group. You solve their problems. You ask questions and understand the pain points of your audience. You use messenger marketing. You do retargeting ads (like I am doing now). I am delivering this content only to the people who have visited my website before. More engagement = more trust.
Transaction
Now that the trust has been built, what's next? Trust doesn't put money in your bank account. Transaction does. So once you build trust, you sell. You push your audience to do a transaction with you (not just for yourself but for their benefit as well).
Your content and trust-building activities until now have only been to get them to transact. Because if they do not transact with you, you do not make a profit, and you will not be able to invest time, money, or energy into creating more content and spending money to get their attention.
How do you get them to transact? You create sales pages and have a good sales copy in it (copywriting). You measure the performance and optimize the sales (conversion rate optimization). You sell via Webinars (1 to many sales).
If you provide value to your customers after they transact with you, you will build even more trust and you can get them to transact with you even more. It becomes a cycle that feeds on itself and a snowball effect sets in. 
Now you do CATT for a long enough time, the magic of compounding sets in, and your personal brand becomes stronger and stronger.
When your personal brand becomes very strong, everything becomes easy. It becomes easy to publish content because you have a huge audience and know what your audience wants. You can get the attention because as soon as people see your new content they would want to read it. Easier to build trust with a new set of audience and strengthen the trust you have with your existing tribe. And easier to get them to transact because the trust factor is very high because of your reputation and fame.
I have been blogging about digital marketing for 7 years at .com and I have been able to reinforce this cycle over and over again to come to where I am today.
My niche is Digital Marketing, for Personal Branding, for Affiliate Marketers, Trainers, and Freelancers.
Your niche could be data science.
Your niche could be fitness.
Your niche could be digital marketing for e-commerce companies.
Your niche could be digital marketing for personal branding.
Your niche could be digital marketing for personal branding for doctors.
Your niche could be digital marketing for personal brands for dentists.
There is an infinite number of niches available in an ever-expanding market.
Select a niche. Build your personal brand as an expert in that niche. Promote products. Train people. Provide services to your niche as a freelancer, employee, or agency.
That's how you make a career out of digital marketing. 
Did you like this post?
Let me know, are you going to choose a niche and build a personal brand around it? Will you follow the CATT model?
Comment CATT and #masstrust below...
...to tell the world that from this day, you are going to get started on this journey of building a personal brand!
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