 So you guys know I'm all about being real, giving you realistic expectations about different careers and telling you which ones I like and which ones aren't that great. Now with that being said, digital marketing is one of my favorite careers and here's why. There's a ton of demand, you can get into it relatively easily without work experience and it pays well and opens up a lot of different paths to other jobs that pay even better. And so what I did is I reached out to a digital marketer that is extremely experienced not only himself doing it, but also helping others become digital marketers themselves. His name is Seth Jared. He is a fellow YouTuber. I met him through a mutual friend and I just had to get him on the channel because he has some invaluable insights about digital marketing. Now I really think you guys are gonna enjoy this one so let's get right into it. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. Shane here again. Today I am very excited to welcome to the channel a very special guest. The friend of mine, Seth, he has another YouTube channel and he is a digital marketer and I got him to come onto the channel so he can tell you how you can get into digital marketing which is a career that I really like. It's also a career that you can transition into if you're not happy with your career right now, if you haven't gotten a college degree yet or if you did get a college degree but it isn't working out for you. So Seth, thank you so much for coming onto the channel. My pleasure, Shane. I'm happy to be here. So Seth, you have one of the coolest stories I've heard and that's one of the reasons I wanted to get you onto the channel so you can tell that story. So please let our viewers know about you. Yeah, sure. Well, you know, like a lot of people, I graduated college with an, I had an art degree film production which was completely worthless. I spent a lot of years waiting tables, delivering pizzas, doing data entry, doing a lot of menial, unfulfilling jobs, no idea how to have a fulfilling career. And then I basically stumbled into digital marketing through a lot of my own research and exploration online and through sort of trial and error, I ended up accumulating a skill set that I had no idea was actually in demand. And I tried to launch my own online businesses but like a lot of people, I found that's a lot harder than some of the gurus make it seem. But with this skill set that I had accumulated, I actually got a job. I actually got hired to be an account technician doing PPC, which is a paper click advertising like Google ads. And in my first job, back in 2011, I was hired with no experience and handed $100,000 a month in advertising to manage for this agency. And actually the VP of the company supervised me while I did this. And I was like overwhelmed but excited. It was absolutely an exciting field. I had no idea it existed before I learned so much. And I was able to leverage up for my first job where I was making just about $16 or $18 an hour all the way up to six figures within three years in this field. And now after having done that myself, I turned around in 2016 and I started teaching other people how to do that. All right, so I have evaluated a lot of different careers on this channel. And one question I get all the time from a lot of people who comment on my channel and people I work with is a lot of them for one, they want to have a good career that they really enjoy, that pays well. You have a lot of upward mobility and it's a valuable skill set. But they also don't wanna have to go to college because college is extremely expensive. Oftentimes the degrees don't work out. In the case of marketing, for instance, they might be teaching you, depending on the program you go to, stuff that worked like 20 years ago or 30 years ago, but they're not teaching you stuff that worked right now. So can you kind of speak on that, like learning about, you know, modern marketing, digital marketing, kind of the way that it's actually being done now versus learning about it in school? Yeah, I mean, I'm very much in line with what you were saying. School, university is so out of date. It's so out of touch with the realities of what employers and the industry is actually looking for. Most marketing programs are run by tenured professors. In fact, I actually Googled NYU, which is my alma mater. I looked at their marketing program and the photograph on the front page of the website is a guy who's gotta be in his late 70s or 80s teaching this class. And I'm not trying to be agist, I'm just talking practically, professors who got tenure 20 or 30 years ago are not adapting and do not understand modern marketing, which is primarily digital. Digital marketing is overtaken traditional marketing as most people may not know the details of that, but you have an idea that the internet's kind of a big deal. And if you enroll in a marketing program at even the top universities in the country, they literally do not include digital in the curriculum. You're learning things like macroeconomics and statistics and things like billboard and radio and TV, I'm not kidding, man. I mean, I've had so many marketing majors come into my program because they're like, hey, I got my degree, but I can't find a job. So I'm looking for some actual practical skillsets. So digital marketing is always changing. It's very obviously cutting edge. So you need to learn it in a cutting edge medium. You need to learn it online. In some of these programs too, they have textbooks and having a textbook is ridiculous in this field because like something that was printed in 2020 is already out of date. So you definitely want to get the information from something that is as current as the internet. Got it. And so for the viewers who aren't fully aware of exactly what digital marketing is, can you kind of break that down a little bit further and kind of tell us kind of just the big picture of what digital marketing is exactly? Yeah, so digital marketing is obviously marketing done on the internet and the broad strokes for people. Like I didn't know anything about this before I stumbled into this field. It's basically advertising and marketing. We're all aware of it, especially in the West. We all know about TV commercials and TV commercials are such a part of our culture that like during the Super Bowl, everybody talks about the commercials. Like we know advertising is everywhere. And it used to be TV, radio, newspaper, billboards back before the internet. Those were the big places to get to advertise. And if you're a small business, you really had no options except for this little thing called the yellow pages, which were these phone books that would get literally physically delivered to people's houses every year. And there were very few options. Now the internet started out very slowly. Over 20 years, it's obviously become huge. And all that advertising from TV, from radio, from newspapers, I mean, who advertises the newspapers anymore, right? Everybody's advertising online. That's how Google makes all their money is through advertising. At least like 80 or 90% of their revenue is not from Android. It's not from whatever other products they have. It's from those little ads on the side of the searches. People clicking on those. It's called pay-per-click advertising. So digital advertising refers to all forms of advertising online, whether it's when you do a Google search and you see those ads, whether you're on a website and you see ads all over the website, whether you're on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and you see advertising, advertising, digital marketing is all over the internet. Got it. Okay, so that's really interesting. How does that help people get jobs in terms of the opportunity that's in the market right now? Because one thing I talk about a lot on my channel is just supply and demand and how much demand there is for a job pretty much predicts almost everything else in most markets, like how much you get paid, your job satisfaction, and a bunch of other things like that. So can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. So the demand for digital marketers is incredibly high and it has been growing ever since 2011 when I got my first job. As you know, during the pandemic we started to see more and more of this, like internet advertising and internet revenue just blew up even more. It had been growing a lot over the last 10 years but it just, it went exponential because businesses who have been resisting the internet were forced to go online because they couldn't do physical business. So the demand for, just to give you some numbers, like on LinkedIn every day back in 2016, 2017 when I started teaching people about this, there were about 30 to 40,000 open digital marketing jobs in the US every day. And they'd be filled and then new jobs would come on the market and it was always changing. Now there's over 200,000 open jobs in the US on LinkedIn every day. So it's about five times as many jobs. The reason there is such a high demand is obviously as I said, more and more commerce is turning to the internet and the jobs themselves involve managing this advertising. The Google ads, the Facebook ads, the Instagram ads, organic web search, which is called SEO. And I can talk more about that a little bit later. But the interesting thing is that these skill sets are things that the average person can learn directly versus traditional advertising with like TV. Like you couldn't just like run your own TV ad and learn about it because TV advertising is incredibly expensive and it's very elite. It's very difficult to, you know, only, there's only so many TV stations but, and radio is the same thing. It's very expensive. You couldn't never get experience like that through your own self-education but with this internet advertising, anybody can set up an advertising account and learn how to do this. And also, you know, that's what I teach people. So people, you can actually learn about it online as well. And as the demand has grown and grown and grown, nobody really knows about this field. I used to, I call it the most in-demand career nobody knows about. And it's insane to me because I started teaching this about six years ago and I assumed within about a year or two the opportunity would pass because I figured the colleges would smarten up, the public would wise up to these opportunities but nobody did. Now there's more and more of these like digital marketing boot camps and stuff that I think are starting to wise up to these opportunities but compared to the supply of skilled workers, the demand is just excessive and that's why it's a great opportunity right now. Got it. And the million dollar question, something that everybody wants to know, how much can you expect to make like right off the bat and then how much can you expect to make within a few years? Okay, that's a great question. So I've been doing this for six years so I have a really good, I have solid like data to back this up. So what I tell people is this, this is a long-term investment. So within one year of experience you should be making about $60,000 a year. Typically the typical path for my students is that they start out in my training and I teach them how to basically do generate their own experience through freelancing or volunteering or just basically getting hands-on experience initially and then how to leverage that into an entry level position. The entry level position can pay anywhere from like the very low end like $35,000 a year but now as things have been changing in the US the economy's been changing. I've been having more and more students getting hired around 45, 50,000 a year. I even had a couple of 19 year olds with no college degree getting hired at 52K a year. Again with no previous experience other than what they did in my training. But I tell people don't like expect to get 50 right out of the bat. A low paying job like a $35,000 a year job is very valuable not for the salary but for the experience because once you get your hands on more and more accounts and once you're actually working on real businesses and you put that on your resume then you can leverage that in about a year up to at least 60K. And then within two years most students are making 70 to 80K and by three to four years that's when you can break six figures and that's what I did. Got it. And then let's just say let's pretend I'm somebody who's never done digital marketing. I have zero digital marketing experience. How long with your training typically would it take somebody to learn digital marketing and then land their first entry level job? So for the typical student it takes between about two to six months depending on the students, how much bandwidth they have to actually ingest this information, absorb it and apply it. Some people have a full time job or they're full time students that they can only put in like a half hour or an hour a day. Obviously it's gonna take those folks longer. People who can dedicate more time to this are gonna have faster results. But something that I teach and I think one of the reasons that I've been doing this for so long is that I want people to have a really solid foundation. I've seen some other programs out there and there was a big craze a couple of years ago with all the social media agency management with like Tai Lopez and stuff where they were really promoting this almost like a crypto coin where it was like, hey you're gonna make a ton of money really fast and just sell people on Facebook ads and that was great but they didn't actually teach people how to actually do the work. And my program is a little bit slower and has more consistent long-term results because I want you to actually, you're learning a completely new skill set. And there are college and university programs that are taking two years to get a degree which is way too long. On the other hand, it's not something you can learn in five minutes or even in a day or two. You wanna be able to put in weeks and weeks of time, ingesting the information, learning about how to do things like PPC and SEO, practicing on your own websites. And then you also have to deal with your, you have to build your confidence. That's the biggest issue I see with people is their mindset, which is why I really enjoy giving people a lot of mindset, support and encouragement. There's a really supportive community because a lot of people have the same concerns I think that your view is probably due which is that, I'm not a digital market, I've never done this before and people feel imposter syndrome initially but the more hands-on experience, the more time you spend on it, the confidence level just grows and grows and grows over time. And that's why, again, it also depends on the student's personality. Some people are so, get so lit up by this and so excited that they get results and some of them get hired within like a month or two and that's amazing. But I would say more commonly, it's like a few months, anywhere between three to six months. Sometimes it takes people a little longer, it takes like eight months but people do get hired if they stick with it and they stay determined because businesses need these skills. All right, so one of the reasons why I brought you on the channel specifically when I was looking up different YouTube channels with different careers is because I saw your Instagram and your YouTube channel and you have seriously, probably the most reviews I've ever seen for somebody selling a course on how to get into a career. Like you have an absolutely ridiculous amount of reviews and I was talking to you earlier and you said that you've actually helped over 10,000 people overall, help to get a job in digital marketing which is absolutely ridiculous. So can you kind of just maybe talk a little bit about some of the reviews and like some of the coolest highlight stories that you've had with your students? It's been incredibly fulfilling to help so many people with this, you know, get jobs in this field and yeah, there are legit success stories like people, you can contact them on LinkedIn, you can see the companies they work for, you can see their first name, their last name, they will answer your questions. Karen was a great success story. She was like 19, didn't wanna get a bachelor's degree, took the course, got an internship and an agency job. This is back in like 2017. I've actually interviewed her many times. I think you might even interview her. She went from working in an agency to doing freelance work. She's bilingual so she was working for a Spanish speaking insurance company doing SEO, making 52,000 a year part time when she was like 20 and then she went on to work at Glassdoor making six figures and now she's working in a startup also making six figures, just crushing it. I had so many people over the six years. I can't actually keep track of all of them but like in recently, I've had like a 19 year old like Kishan who was like a lot of people in high school. He didn't wanna go to college. He knew he didn't wanna do something on the internet but he didn't know what to do. He took the course, got a $52,000 a year entry level job and he leveled up to 70 K at this new agency within six months. And he's like, he literally just wrote to me. He's laughing because he's been, he's going to some conference in Miami and they're all gonna go, the team's all going out to a bar. He's like, I can't go cause I can't drink cause he's not 21. I had like Andrea, who was one of my coaches. She was working in a healthcare field. She was burnt out because she was being underpaid and overworked. She found my course and she got an SEO job at Thompson Reuters which is this giant multinational company. She's doing, working on their property fine law which is basically SEO for lawyers. And she's been doing it for about three years and her life has changed. Nick, my other coach, he was working at Metro PCS when he found the course making like $11 an hour. Now he's making like 80 K. He's worked with Netflix and other huge brands. He's managed millions in ad spend. This is over a period of like three to four years. But Armando, 52 years old. He's like one of my older students. He's a Marine. He was working in like selling like medical technology. Very unhappy, got, took the course and he ended up working at Caesars Entertainment as doing search engine management and he's moved on since then. I could go on and on. I mean, I think that's what the channel is for. But, but yeah, man, it's, there's a whole network of people and the alumni, it's really awesome is the alumni are so happy that they come back to my course and help out the current students. They share job opportunities that they offer, you know, advice. It's really been great in that regard. Awesome. So I have two more questions really quickly. The first one is can you do this as a remote job? How common is it? Especially after everything that happened in the last few years for people to be able to do this as a remote job? Cause I know a lot of my viewers really like either doing a hybrid model where they're partially remote or they're fully remote. Right. Remote jobs are abundant in this field. Now I did a video back in like 2019 and actually I was very discouraging. I was like, you know, some people get remote job but it's like one out of 10 or something like that. And you have to have a lot of experience. Well, I think I took that video down because it's totally different now. Again, because of the pandemic, we have to thank for that. Yeah, most agencies and most of my most recent successes have been getting remote jobs. And, you know, the paradigm shift that happened during COVID has been a good thing in many ways because most of these agencies realized, you know, they can get more efficiency, happier workers and they can save on the overhead of having an actual office. Now there are still on site, you know, in-house jobs and there's a lot of hybrid jobs. What's happened with a lot of agencies is really go, hey, we kind of want to have a good mix of socializing and culture and remote work. So you might have a job where you work remotely three days a week, but you go into the office and socialize two days a week. But remote work is very, very common in this field now. Got it. And then the second question I want to ask, this is another thing I talk about quite a bit on my channel. Flexibility is extremely underrated when you're looking at different careers. So when I talk about flexibility, not only do I mean like, is it a career that has a, you know, a high vertical? Like, can you rise up through the ranks and get paid more and more? But on top of that, is it a career that teaches you a skillset that is going to help you to switch into a different career later on down the line if you have a better opportunity? Something like maybe product manager or something along those lines. And then another thing that I talk about is in terms of flexibility is is it a really valuable skillset that is just going to help you in other areas of your life in general, whether you want to start your own business down the line or something along those lines. So is digital marketing one of those careers that's extremely flexible? It's absolutely. So, and I know kind of if I was listening to this, I'd be like, it sounds like almost too good to be true, but the way I look at it is like, this is just what happens when you find an opportunity that not that many people know about. Still the general mainstream does not have any clue about these jobs. And even when my students get hired, their family's like, my parents still don't know what I do. They can't explain it. And that's why these things are possible. So the flexibility and the value of digital marketing is there's threefold, like three things, but two things you mentioned and one thing I'm going to add it. Number one, in terms of opportunities, absolutely. My course, what it does is it gives, it's almost like kindergarten. It gives people the language, the basics and the foundations. And I want people to get that first agency job because what a lot of other courses do that I don't like is they're either too thin, they don't have enough information or they have too much and they overwhelm people, information overload, and they're giving them theory. And I'm like, I'm gonna give you just enough information to get that first job. Once you're on the job, you get learned so much and my students, they pivot. They pivot into places I don't even realize. Like I got people who are doing AI, they're learning how to code JavaScript, which I can't do. You don't have to do that. Other people get into branding. Other people like Angel is one of my students, Angel Nievej, right? He started out, he's working at Staples. He got an agency job, making 40, 40k a year doing SEO, then he went up to 70k, then he went over 100. And he's working in a very interesting business which is a SaaS company, software as a service. So he's doing like enterprise level SEO on these giant websites, which is a very niche skill set within SEO. So people, my students, they pivot all over the place all the time. They get up to manager levels, which is when you really start making the six figures. You wanna, I mean, within digital marketing, there's just a lot of different areas. You can go and get into copywriting. You could do a brand strategy for a big company. There's a lot of different things you can do. I don't think, like you mentioned product manager. I don't even know what that is. No, you wouldn't go from digital marketing to product manager. But within digital marketing, there's just like a lot of different options. And then that leads me to your second point, which is digital, everybody needs marketing. This is something like they don't teach you in art school, they don't teach you anywhere. Even if you're a doctor, this is the craziest thing. Maybe, well, doctors are still very much in demand, but even doctors have to do marketing. Lawyers have to do marketing. I mean, if you ever watch Better Call Saul, right? Lawyers have to promote themselves. So it's so funny, like if you're a lawyer, you spend all this time and money on your education, and then you're like, I don't have any clients. Well, then you're gonna have to hire a digital marketer to help you get clients. So pretty much everybody needs digital marketing. And so you can use these skillsets for your own business, which a lot of my students, once they have the confidence and the experience, they do do that. They launch their own, some students have launched their own e-commerce businesses because now they have the competency. A lot of people just rush into e-commerce without any digital marketing skills and they just lose money. But you can start your own online business, promote it properly, promote your own Instagram, promote your own Facebook, promote your own blog, whatever it is. You can use it to promote a non-digital business if you open something local. Every business needs digital marketing. That's why it's blown up so much. And so I encourage everybody to actually learn this because I think if you're gonna do anything entrepreneurial at some point, you're gonna need this skillset. And the last thing, which you didn't mention, when you talk about flexibility, I thought you meant in terms of like work-life balance. And this field has one of the best work-life balances I've ever heard of. And you could listen to my students' stories. A lot of them came from industries. Some of them work in like an Amazon warehouse, which is like hell, you know, you have absolutely no flexibility. You're on there like a robot. The girl, the woman who was working in healthcare, you know, was saying how like she would have to fight with her supervisor to get time off if she needed to take care of something with her family. Whereas most of these digital marketing jobs are, it's a very young culture. It's very cutting edge. It's based on the whole Google kind of campus idea of things. All the jobs I ever worked at, they had like ping-pong tables and stuff like that. But even if they don't have those types of things, the general attitude is that one of maturity and responsibility. And the attitude is usually like, if you get your work done, we don't care. Like if you need to go out and like run errands or take care of your kid or something, we're not gonna micromanage you. We're gonna teach you like an adult. That's one of the more refreshing aspects in this industry that a lot of people like. All right, so Seth does have to go. Thank you again so much for coming on the channel. Seth does have his own YouTube channel and then he also has a masterclass that's basically something if you're interested in digital marketing or you think you might be interested in it, you can check out the masterclass. He goes into a lot more detail on exactly what it is, what the different important branches are, what you can expect if you wanna try to get into it. I actually took it myself and I thought it was really awesome. So definitely check that out. I'll probably have it in the description, pinned comment and maybe I'll have it pop up on the screen somewhere around here. But anyways, thank you so much for coming on again Seth. I really appreciate it. I really love what you're doing and thanks again. My pleasure Shane, thanks for having me on.