As promised in my last post about how a student can get a marketing job, I'll share about the things I've learnt from taking actions and trying. The purpose of this post is not to show off what I've learnt; but to encourage you to take actions by showing you how much you can learn if you just try. You will almost definitely fall down or fail, but you will learn a lot through these experiences.

(Seth Godin, 2012)

My Attempts

The 2 main things I've tried and am still trying this year are:

• My Startup Marketing and Development Blog
• Apps to Watch articles on Despreneur

(Special thanks to Tomas Laurinavicius of Despreneur, a stranger-turned-friend whom I sat with for 8 hours while going to Paris last December. If he did not urged me to start something then, I would not have started this blog or write on Despreneur.)

Things I've Learnt

While my blog or my articles have not been wildly successful, I was exposed to and managed to learn several things which are very useful. I have separated them into 2 categories - Marketing and Others.

Marketing

1) Customer Persona

I have learnt that the most fundamental thing to start with for marketing is to know who I want to market to. This goes to the extent of creating a persona for my typical "customer". For example, the persona I have created for this blog is a student who aspires to be an entrepreneur and is interested in marketing. He reads about startup news and articles online during his free time. Once I have created this persona, I know how to craft my articles, where to share my articles and how to reach my potential readers.

If you are selling a product or service, this is applicable too. When you can define who your customers are, where they usually hangout, how they usually go about solving the problem you are trying to solve, etc., you will then know how to market your product or service to reach them. For instance, if you know that they usually hangout on Facebook, you can use Facebook target ads to reach them. This will make your marketing effort more effective.

2) Google Analytics

Because I want to know how many people read my blog, I set up Google Analytics for my blog. Through watching videos and reading tutorials, I have learnt how to set up Google Analytics for my blog and how to use it at a basic level. Data analytic platforms like Google Analytics are very useful for marketing nowadays because they allow us to measure and improve our marketing efforts.

With such tools, in terms of internet marketing, you can find out many insights - how many people clicked on your ads, which ads attracted the most clicks, which ads converted the most people into paying customers and so on. By knowing all that and trying to understand the underlying reasons, you can then refine your marketing strategy accordingly. For example, through Google Analytics, I can determine which are my most popular articles. I then try to understand the reason for their popularity and refine my strategy.

3) Mailchimp

As I wanted my readers to be able to receive my articles in their email inboxes and not having to worry about missing any of my articles, I played around with MailChimp to create newsletters which my readers can sign up to. In the process, I've learnt quite a bit such as collecting email addresses for mailing list and creating email marketing campaigns. Although I'm not a master of email marketing yet, it is useful to have some knowledge in this area as email marketing is one of the best customer acquisition channels (Custora, 2013).

(Just experienced another failure. Apologies to all my subscribers. I do not know why all my previous articles were sent to your inboxes again. Sorry for the flooding your inboxes :/)

Others

4) WordPress.org

I have shifted my blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org a while back due to the advantages of WordPress.org such as full control and more flexibility. If you don't know the difference, see this infographic. While making that switch was not easy, I realised that if you bother to search, there are many helpful resources online.

WordPress is "the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites" (WordPress, 2014). It is likely that many websites you visit use WordPress.org as their Content Management System (CMS); for instance, TechCrunch. Also, HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing study in 2012 discovered that 62% of the businesses studied own a blog. Therefore, knowing how to use WordPress.org is a handy skill and taking the leap to switch over has given me the opportunity to learn it.

5) Hosting and domains

Finally, because I wanted to switch to WordPress.org and own alfredlua.com, I had to learn about hosting and domains. To be honest, it was quite intimidating at the start but after spending sometime reading online and with the help of my friends, I found that it was not that hard to understand. Now, I am the proud owner of alfredlua.com and I even have my unique email address, alfred[at]alfredlua.com.

All in all, while I am not a specialist in any of the areas mentioned above, taking the dive to try new things had made me gain much useful knowledge which would definitely help me in the future. I hope that this post has inspired you to try something or anything. If you did, let me know! (:

Note: I will not be posting on Facebook anymore so if you do not want to miss any of my articles, drop me your email (: