How to Keep Your Knowlegde up-to-date for (almost) Free
Marketing

How to Keep Your Knowlegde up-to-date for (almost) Free

9th October 2014

getting-knowledge

The Digital Marketing World is a rapidly changing world. If you want to keep your knowledge up-to-date you have to work hard. Standing still means going backwards.

This summer we asked industry experts about their knowledge and about how they think the current state of digital marketing training is organized. There were some very diverse answers as well as agreement on many levels. One thing they all agreed on: knowledge is important.

Now for the challenging part though. You are a digital marketer and you want to keep your knowledge up-to-date. What to do? You can go to your boss and ask for a budget for training, but not everyone will get that budget or have a boss for that matter.

Still, there is a lot you can do to keep your knowledge up-to-date without spending too much money.

One thing to keep in mind though is to always be critical on what you read or hear. The fact that something is published on a website or said at a conference doesn’t mean it’s true. Always keep your eyes open and doublecheck.

Feeds of websites

This is the ‘easiest one’. If you want to stay up to date it is smart to keep track of what specific websites in your niche are writing about. Good old RSS plays a big role here. I personally use Feedly to gather feeds of the websites I think are important. Off course State of Digital is one of them, but here’s the important part: differentiate.

I have made folders within Feedly which describe the different websites, both on topic, trust and type of content. This means that news goes into one folder and opinion articles in another and guides, lists etcetera, all have their own folder. This means a lot of different folders, but it makes me go through the big clutter of websites a lot quicker.

[Tweet “Don’t just follow a feed, break it up into what’s important for you – @basvandenbeld”]

If a website has the option to have feeds for topics (categories for example) I take that specific feed. Which means I will have more feeds for one website in some cases. For example https://www.stateofdigital.com/tag/news/feed is a different feed than https://www.stateofdigital.com/tag/opinion/feed/.

This way I will know the essence of an article before reading it and will therefor understand a) if I want to read it and b) how important it is knowledge wise.

feedly

Events

Face to face networking is one of the best ways to improve your knowledge level. Going to an event and listening to industry experts will always increase your knowledge. My rule always is that if you get one thing out of a talk, it has been worth it.

However, you might not be able to afford going to conferences all over the world. The ticket prices can be expensive. There are ways however, in which you still can get the information:

Free events

There are free events out there specifically aimed at industry experts. BrightonSEO probably is the best known in that area and they have other shows on other topics (like Content Marketing and PPC) as well. Also meetups are a place where you can get ‘free’ information.

Follow the blogs on the event

State of Digital covers a lot of events. Other blogs do as well. You could keep up to date with what is being said at a conference by following these blogs.

Follow the event hashtag

Another good way of getting a sense of the important things that are shared at events are the hashtags of the events. By following that (for example #brightonseo or #smx) you will see what those that are there find important. Also the speakers will often share their own highlights.

speaking-whiteCover the event yourself

If you are a blogger you might be eligible for a free ticket. If you can provide the event with enough coverage they might be interested in giving the ticket to you. You have to realize though that this ticket is not a free pass, you need to work for it! You will need reach, if you don’t have that yourself try signing up as an event blogger on sites that do.

Speak yourself

Another way of getting into conferences ‘free’ is speaking yourself. If you are an expert in a certain area, pitch to speak, it might get you two shots in one: you have a stage of your own and you get to see all the other talks for free!

Go out to dinner with peers

Finally, when you are at an event, don’t leave at 5pm. Stick around. Go out to dinner and drinks with peers. Not just to network. Not just to make friends and get drunk, but to learn as well. The most interesting conversations around the latest developments happen over dinner. Find yourself a nice seat in the middle of the table and open your ears during dinner!

Find presentations online

Many events these days record their talks and publish them afterwards. This is freely available for all of us! By going online to the right places you will find nuggets of gold to increase your knowledge level:

YouTube

YouTube is filled with talks around marketing related topics. But to be honest, you can probably find interesting presentations about almost any topic.

The trick is knowing how to search on YouTube. If you know a certain speaker, search her or his name. If you know a good conference, search that. But I find the most interesting talks by using the right keywords on the topic. For example “Big data keynote’ will give you around 342,000 videos on YouTube. Refinining that is the trick: filter with ‘This month’, ‘Video’ and ‘Long (20 minutes+) gives you around 1,930 results. Take your pick!

youtube-presentations

TED(x)

YouTube isn’t the only place you can find videos of presentations. You can go to sites like Vimeo as well off course, but there are also specific sites to go to. Even tough TED(x) has been hyped like crazy, there is still very good content to be found on their website. And you can even install an app on your tablet to make it easy.

[Tweet “Plenty of great presentations are freely available online, for example on YouTube or TED.com”]

Slideshare

Finally there is Slideshare. This is a resource of great content. This is where speakers upload their own presentations. Even though you miss the speaker explaining his slides (I know that in my case it can be difficult to interpret because I use a lot of images) you can still get the most important parts of the presentations.

Social Media

Social Media is a very good resource to find knowledge. Off course there is your own timeline of people you follow but there is more you can do to make the most out of Social Media and Twitter in specific

Twitter lists

Twitter lists are very useful to follow a specific group of people that share certain knowledge. Create (private of public) lists of those knowledgeable in a certain topic and check what they have to say.

Hashtags

In the event part I mentioned hashtags as a good way of following what is happening at an event. They are also very useful when it comes to increasing knowledge in a certain topic. #ppc and #seo are obvious ones but you can go as in depth as you want.

Twitterchats

The hastags are also used to organize twitterchats. These chats have groups of people talking about one topic. Good examples are #blogchat, #facebookchat or #ppcchat. But you can find them on many different topics.

Groups

Facebook, Google and Linkedin can also be very valuable sources. Where Twitter is more an aggregator of information from around the web, groups on these platforms can be much more a place where the knowledge is shared directly. Off course there are (especially in some groups) people who only share links to their website(s), but if you look well you will be able to find groups on Facebook or Linkedin or Communities on Google+ where people actually have discussions. They share information but also ask questions, which are being answered by others. The right groups will give you the right knowledge!

Q&A sites

Finally there are Q&A websites. My personal favorite is Quora.com. Here you get experts answering questions. Questions you can follow. So find the right topic, find the right questions and start learning from the answers. And is the information you are looking for not there? Ask a question yourself!

Books

I personally feel that books are still one of the most important resources for gaining knowledge. They beat blogposts by far, usually because there has been done a lot more research by the author and the author usually also has ‘pre-readers’ or editors, people who make sure there is not too much nonsense in a book. Many blogposts miss this extra filter. So I try to read as many books as possible, some good and some bad, but I always get things out of it.

[Tweet “In the end, nothing beats reading a book when it comes to increasing knowledge”]

Buy Books

Off course the best thing to do is buy the books. The authors have worked hard to create something special and they deserve to be rewarded, even if it’s just a little bit.

Getting good books (in our case around digital marketing topics) is easy. There are services like Amazon and Goodreads which have great collections of books or can tell you where to find them. If you prefer an audiobook you can go to Audible for example. To me audiobooks are great because I travel a lot and can listen to them (in high speed) and thus read a lot more.

Go the library!

It might sound old fashioned, but there are still great libraries out there where you can find all the books on the topic you want. Become a member or borrow someone else’s membership card, step outside an go!

George-peabody-library

The free books

There are also free books to be found online, though they are usually of a lot less quality. But there are some good resources to find free books:

Google Books
Wikibooks
Textbook revolution

E-books and guides

Finally when it comes to books there are the (free) e-books. Keep in mind that these are usually written by a commercial entity, which makes they have more than just the sharing knowledge purpose. This means not every e-book out there should be trusted, but again, there are plenty or great ones freely available.

E-books are usually published by site like ours or E-Consultancy for example. Do a search for ‘free download ebook on digital marketing’ for example and there are plenty ready for download. Usually they don’t cost you more than your e-mail.

Google

Off course Google itself is a great resource as well. There are different ways of using Google to grow your knowledge.

Search

First off all, what Google is best at: search. By searching Google you can find a lot of good information (like the websites mentioned above). The trick however is not to believe everything you read right away, but to apply the right filters to be more sure you find the right content.

Filters you should use first of all are the time-filters. By clicking on ‘search tools’ you can choose a date range. Try the newer results first. You can also filter on ‘news’ for example, which will give you more relevant news around the topic you are interested in.

The main thing when using Google for knowledge growth however is the search phrases you use. Really understand how the authors might write and search not for keywords, but for sentences. For example:

“a good explanation of why big data is important” will give you much more insights than just a search for “big data”.

Google Scholar

Another very good resource by Google is Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) . Here you can search specifically for scholarly literature. And again you can use filters to look for the most recent papers for example.

Google_Scholar

Webinars

A great online resource which more often than not is free these days is webinars. Take for example the webinar I did on blogging earlier this year. This is free knowledge shared by experts. The only thing you need to do is sign up. Websites like for example Digital Marketing Depot or Hubspot or ClickZ offer free webinars that can increase your knowledge very much.

Online Courses

Closely related to webinars are online courses. Where webinars usually are a one-time presentation, courses actually take you more in depth through a topic. And you get assignments as well, making it much more like ‘school’.

These days online courses come in many forms. There are the paid ones by the experts, which will really take you to the next level, but there are also very valuable free courses available on websites like Coursera, Khan Academy and Academic Earth.

Find a mentor (or two)

The final resource of increasing your knowledge for free is find the right mentors. Get in touch with experts and try and help them where possible. In return they will share their knowledge with you.

Basically this is networking (like I mentioned at events above), but when done right it is much more than that, it’s building relationships. Relationships that help you get more knowledge.

[Tweet “A mentor should give you insights you could not think of yourself”]

I myself have several people I can turn to, to increase my knowledge. Each one as important as the other. And in the end, they are my most valuable resource when it comes to keeping my knowledge up-to-date.

As you can see there is a lot you can do. One thing is important though. To increase your knowledge you can rely on free resources as much as you can, but you always have to stay critical. The real learning is within yourself, by being critical and trying things out, you can really learn and become much more knowledgeable.

[Tweet “The real learning is within yourself, by being critical and trying things out – @basvandenbeld”]

Finally, over to you: how do you keep your knowlegde up to date?

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Written By
Bas van den Beld is an award winning Digital Marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. He is the founder of State of Digital and helps companies develop solid marketing strategies.
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