 In today's video, I'm going to be interviewing somebody who's a few years into their career as a digital marketer and their name is Roberto. Now, Roberto does have a very cool story of how he got into digital marketing and I think people are going to really love the story itself plus they're going to really like the fact that he is a few years into the career. So you can kind of see what the progression would be like for somebody typically. You know, you start off maybe 40, 50K a year by the end of the first year you might be able to get a job that's like around 70,000 and around year three or so you can hit that six figure mark. And this is incredible for a job that you can get into without a college degree or any previous experience. So make sure to gently tap that like button if you enjoy videos like this to let me know and let's try to get this one to 300 likes. And also subscribe to the channel, hit that bell notification so you don't miss out on any future content and let's jump right into the video. Welcome back to the channel guys. So today I brought on a guest, somebody who got into digital marketing about five years ago and so they're a little bit into their career. They're a little past kind of the entry level stage. They have a little more experience in digital marketing and I know a few people requested that I bring someone in who has a few more years of experience. And so I was able to get Roberto on the channel. So thank you so much for coming on and telling your story Roberto. Yeah, of course. Hi everybody, nice to meet you Shane. All right, so let's go ahead and start at the beginning before you even discovered digital marketing. So you're thinking about what career do you want to go into? You're looking at a bunch of different career paths. There's so many different ways getting into careers. How did you stumble upon digital marketing and kind of like what was your mindset at that point? Yes, so I graduated in 2017 with a degree in economics from West Virginia University. Economics, definitely a broad based discipline. I particularly didn't know what I wanted to do when I was in school, but I just knew economics was a field that can be applied to many different disciplines of work. A lot of statistics involved a lot of data analysis. So I could have went into finance, I could have went into something like insurance. But ultimately at the time during the summer I was really researching careers and I grew up in the age of like social media and Google and I really kind of became to realize that a lot of brands were building their business through digital marketing and courses and platforms like Facebook and Google and all of those. So I was never really interested in marketing because I always thought about TV ads but as I really started to research more I came to understand that this is something where I can really drive impact. So I started researching different YouTube videos, came across Seth's course and ended up taking the course, got through all the material within about a month and was hired shortly after. Got it, okay. So you took the course, how long? So you took just a month to go through the course. So you really kind of like went all in and just like went through the modules relatively quickly. So how was the course? The course was awesome. He gave a lot of insight into paid search, search engine optimization or SEO. And he also gave like just really good advice on steps to take to get experience so that when you actually go for an interview you have subject matters and projects to speak to. I think that was one of the bigger things, right? So I was able to use some of the material in terms of SEO to actually take like a free internship with a business owner who owned like a website and was trying to rank higher for her website in Google so that she could get more affiliate marketing dollars. So saw her job posting on Craigslist or maybe LinkedIn, messaged her right away and just kind of worked with her for like maybe a month. There's a little bit of overlap between me taking the course and me working with her. But that was like great advice because when I did like go into one of my first interviews I was able to speak to that experience and also just show that was being like proactive about my job search. Got it. So it took you about a month or so to take the course and you also worked with somebody else. And that's of course some advice that Seth gives is try to get some sort of portfolio or some sort of experience as fast as you can. So if you are interested in digital marketing but you're not 100% sure what it is or you wanna know a little bit more about it there's a bunch of different verticals in digital marketing. You've got like paper click, you have Facebook ads, you got social media marketing, SEO, et cetera. If you wanna learn what all of that is Seth does have a free masterclass you can check it out down below. It's a few hours I took it myself and I thought it was very useful. I learned quite a bit from it. So you can check that out. I'll put it in the description and the pin comment down below. Now after you were done with the course how long did it take you to get that first job? I think I had interviews within two or three weeks and I started right after the third. So I think it was about a month. I started right after Thanksgiving. So I took the course in like September, October. So I pulled the trigger, took the course in a month. So it was like mid-October when I started when I ended it, started freelancing then I had a couple of interviews and I started right after Thanksgiving of 2017. Wow, that's pretty remarkable. Pretty much one month to get a job. That's not bad at all. Two months after you started the course. So I mean, a lot of the time, even with careers that are in high demand like these boot camps and stuff, they say like 18 months sometimes. Like, okay, the boot camp takes like nine months and then another nine months to get a job. So that's pretty amazing. He was able to get you a job in two months. And obviously, you did most of it but with the help of the course. So let's go ahead and if you don't mind let's talk a little bit about salary. So you can share whatever you're comfortable with but I'm kind of interested how much do people expect to make kind of entry level and then maybe a year or two years in and then maybe five years down the line kind of how much would people expect to make and you can also speak on your own personal experience if you're comfortable. Yeah, definitely. So the good thing about digital marketing is that there's so much demand for right now every business needs to do digital marketing whether it's search engine optimization or paid social, which is actually what I work in or paid search or affiliate. There's so much demand for right now. So when I came in 2017, I was getting paid like around 40 grand but every year you get a pretty hefty pay raise. One, because if you work in a large metropolitan area like myself, I work in New York city there's ample opportunities to jump around. Now that was back before the remote work era kind of, right? So now you still have, you have even more potential to jump around and get a salary raise. So your employer realizes that, right? So they'll give you a good pay bump. Like I've been at my agency the last three years and I think I've gotten three or four pay raises with bonuses as well the last two years. So now at a point where I'm making over six figures, four years into my career four or five years into my career. So it's kind of like a 20, I'd say at least a 20% pay raise almost every year. If not more, just obviously if you're good at your job if you show up every day and are diligent about what you're doing and you're constantly learning you're just gonna increase your value to your clients if you work in the agency or to your stakeholders if you work within a company they're not gonna want to see you leave and they know that there's ample opportunities out there. So there is a lot of demand for this kind of job. And if you're diligent and start learning and are really good at it then you can make a lot of money in this career. Got it. So somebody who is maybe thinking about going into digital marketing they're thinking like, is this a good career for me? Is it not a good career for me? Are there any kind of differentiators with digital marketing? Like if you notice any personality traits that makes a good digital marketer versus somebody who maybe shouldn't go into it. Yeah, I think in digital marketing you definitely need to be organized for one, you are managing large amounts of money and putting into ad servers and a lot of things can go wrong. You can have certain overspends and things of that kind so you definitely need to be organized. I think also for me like, I specifically work more in performance marketing. So there's a lot of data involved with that. If you work more on the brand marketing side as much in the weeds of data and it's more about kind of working with your clients to craft interesting messages on social media but like for example, going to paid search it's almost always about performance because that is truly a performance channel. So yeah, if you wanna like do more performance marketing than definitely being data driven is a key component of it. And the other thing I would say which is probably true for a lot of fields and a lot of job functions but it's constantly changing. So you have to have high levels of adaptability. For example, last year Apple as many reviewers might know started asking people whether they would want advertisers to track them. And that had a direct impact on my job because that made it harder to retarget people who had been to our clients websites. So you have to be very agile and have high level and have a high level of adaptability to changes, right? Because that won't be the only change there's changes that happen every two or three months if you think about TikTok like they're jumping onto the scene in a big way and they have so many new ad products and ways to go viral. So you're constantly learning. So I would say that if you're not you want something a little bit more stable where you're not having a new update every month or every two months then definitely not the career for you. But yeah, if you're kind of motivated by that and love learning and love staying updated it's an interesting field. It's definitely in the press a lot. If you hear about Facebook, TikTok or Google you're working with these big tech companies and there's actually opportunities as well to jump to a big tech company on the sales side of thing. I know a lot of people who have went over to Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat on the sales side. So if you ever wanted to work at a big tech company but maybe don't have the technical skills like a coder or a developer this is definitely a gateway into getting into one of those companies. Got it, so very flexible has a lot of like horizontal flexibility. You can switch into other careers or you can just kind of rise up through the different marketing careers that are available. So last thing I wanna ask you really quickly and thank you so much for coming on cause I know you're very busy. Last thing I wanna ask you is basically what do you think your ROI on the course was? So your return on investment on a course to kind of compare it to maybe a college degree how much a college degree costs say if they got like a marketing degree versus how much Seth's course costs and then the results that you would get in terms of like how much you make. Yeah, I mean the results from Seth's course or I would say from an ROI perspective or exponential had I not taken the course whether I had started a career in digital marketing kind of hard to say on that front and he definitely guided me into getting a freelance position and really be able to speak the language and learn about paid search and SEO in a very formatted way. So I think the ROI is probably more than a hundred X if I think about it and when you compare it to a college degree which is you know can cost upwards of 200 grand. It doesn't even really compare. I still think that you know some places some companies do require a college degree so it's still good to get that college degree if you can. However, if you're you know somebody who doesn't have the financial means of attending college then I know you can take this course and easily get clients or work at an agency that doesn't require a college degree. So the ROIs are really hard to compare from that perspective. It's you know these what Seth teaches in his course are very technical and skills that you can talk to on a job interview whereas a marketing degree is kind of more fluffy and psychological. They don't really teach you about Google ads or Facebook ads and that's what employers are really looking for these days. They want to know that you can go into Google set up a branded search campaign and you know set up the budget correctly. So they really want those technical skills in digital marketing more and more these days. It's good to know the psychology behind it but you won't really use the psychology of marketing till you're like later in your career. I want to say maybe five, six, seven years down where you're a manager or director. So this is definitely a course like get you into that entry level job and you're able to progress pretty officially as I mentioned before you can get easily promoted within one year and then promoted another time after that. I think myself I've been three or four times in just four or five years of working. So yeah, the ROI is super efficient on set scores. All right, well thank you so much for coming on the channel again and sharing your extensive experience and insight on set scores and just digital marketing in general. Really appreciate you coming on and maybe we'll get you back in a year or two or something like that. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me Shane, appreciate it and have a great rest of your day.