There’s a common misconception that to learn digital marketing you need to join a digital marketing institute, spend thousands of rupees in fees, and need to wait 2-3 years before you start earning.

I have seen digital marketing institute charging around Rs.50K+, just to teach plain tactics and skills. 

That’s why I am writing this content to let you know a better way of learning digital marketing while getting paid for it. This will help you grow as a marketer and help you do stuff that you have never thought of doing before in leveling up your digital marketing skills.

Now, there’s a preconceived notion among many people that you have to go to a costly institute to learn any skill. Many depend on these institutes to get all the learning material and even depend on them to get a job. 

It may be the right thing to do before the internet came. But in this digital era, things are moving at 10X speed now. By the time you graduate from a digital marketing institute, most of the concepts might get outdated and most institutes can’t keep up with the changes.

Surely, there’s a better way right? well, there is – Digital Deepak Internship.

So, first, who is Digital Deepak?

Well, according to Google – “Deepak Kanakaraju, usually known as “Digital Deepak” in the industry is a Blogger, Speaker & Trainer in the Digital Marketing field. He has more than 10 years experience in Digital Marketing and is the co-founder of PixelTrack Digital. He blogs about digital marketing at DigitalDeepak.com. “

This is a no brainer that someone who is having over 10 years of experience and also running a great agency called PixelTrack, is definitely much better equipped to teach you the skills required to become a great marketer. 

But this is not the only reason why I am recommending Digital Deepak Internship. The internship itself has a unique concept of rewarding those who are taking action. 

This means that if you complete all the tasks on time then you might get some money back and may even get a chance to earn more than what you paid for. The actual amount may vary from batches to batches.

But there’s not a single Digital marketing institute in India and probably in the whole world, which will give your money back for the action you take.

Many institutes will simply take your money while promising you job placement. And many still don’t provide the “promised” job also.

But Deepak really keeps up his promise and gives you cash back on completion and I am the living proof here.

So, how it all works?

First, you need to apply for the internship by filling this form. Seats are limited per batch, so, apply fast.

After that, you will get a notification in your email about the dates of the internship webinar. In this webinar, Deepak or one of his team member will explain to you about the internship program and give you enough reason on why you need to apply to the internship.

They will also reveal the internship fee and total cashback you will get during the internship period. Then they will provide you with the payment link to pay the fee there. 

The webinar happens usually 10-15 days before the internship starts.

Then when the internship starts, they will ask you for your UPI ID. This will get you excited as on signup they will transfer a small amount to your bank account to get you into action mode.

Now, enough about the pre-internship work. Let’s talk about the actual internship…

In the first week, Deepak talks about Success Mindset. 

This section is not about marketing per se, but more about growing as a human being and changing your behavior to get ultimate success. 

Here, Deepak talks about how it is important to track all things, talks about food, personality tests (like 16personalities.com ), and how you can dream big.

A success mindset is about everything you can do as a human being to achieve your dream goal.

Then come the second week, where the real Marketing part starts. 

Here, Deepak talks about the marketing fundamentals that you need to know before you even start digital marketing.

We have been doing marketing for ages and as human beings, we are used to being marketed in many different forms like billboards, print media, ads, etc.

Digital marketing is another new form of marketing but marketing fundamentals remain the same. We humans haven’t changed a bit in millions of years.

So, no matter which forms of marketing technology you are using, we are still marketing to the same old humans. And that’s what Deepak will teach.

The main marketing fundamentals you need to know before you start marketing.

Deepak will also touch upon the topics of economics, personal branding, and how it’s all connected to marketing.

And also the famous CATT formula will be taught to amplify your marketing result.

Now, let’s talk about the third week, where we learn about choosing a niche and researching keywords.

There’s a saying, “Don’t compete, dominate. Be the best in your field.” 

And that’s where niche comes. 

In this week, Deepak will tell you a better way to choose your niche and how you can dominate the niche.

Here, you will learn about tools to get started and review your niche. 

You will learn the power of a creator and how you can become a T-shaped marketer.

Your life experiences define your niche. So, a combination of talent and passion with market needs decides your niche.

And Deepak will tell you the best way to go about it and know your niche. 

This includes creating a Facebook community and understanding your audience.

You will also get to know how the power of creation can make you a god of your own work. And how you can enjoy your life by keeping creating content.

You will learn how to reach out to your customer avatar, understand their pain points deeply, and then finalize and master your niche. 

Learning to dominate a niche is a great starting point for any marketer and as a human being. 

And what I learned in the internship is that we can’t dominate everything in life but dominating a particular area/niche can help you live a fulfilled life.

After dominating your niche, you will also learn how to connect it to your personal brand and make it an identity of yourself to the world.

You might find this article (written by Deepak) interesting if you are interested in the personal branding stuff.

Now, here comes the fourth week 4, where actual learning of marketing techniques start – starting a WordPress blog.

One of the best things I liked about this internship is that Deepak is not only trying to teach techniques of digital marketing, that most institutes do but also trying to give his vast amount of experience as a marketer and human being, to teach from basic fundamentals.

When someone starts a journey as a marketer, the first thing that comes to mind is that you don’t need a website now. 

But he gave a different perspective. Having a website will help you grow exponentially as a marketer because you are getting real-life practical experience from it.

When you build your own website, you create something. You will get to know the experience of setting up a real website and how to optimize it to get experience as a real marketer.

And Deepak did a great job of explaining the process of setting up a website. He comprehensively explained all the basic stuff needed to set up your first own WordPress website and start creating a blog.

Now, I understand some may not like the idea of spending money on domain/hosting in the beginning but trust me, it will be worth it.

Learning to create a WordPress website and setting up your own blog will give you immense experience as a marketer and grow your personal brand in the long term.

Deepak also teaches about a domain and hosting and how it’s all connected to a DNS server, to set up your WordPress website and start writing blogs on it.

You will also get to know about google analytics and how you can install a free theme on your WordPress website to get started.

This is the first week of the internship where you will get to learn about actual marketing techniques and it was totally worth the wait.

Next comes the fifth week – the content week, where you will learn to finally start writing content.

Here, Deepak will teach you how you can start creating content by first writing some blogs and then slowly becoming an authority in your niche. 

You will get to know how you can start dominating your niche on the internet by start writing a blog. 

A blog is mainly about writing your own experience on the internet from the knowledge you gain after reading and applying all kinds of materials.

And Deepak will tell you that how you can use your blog to get a potential customer to take a particular action you desire and grow your personal brand.

You will learn that how writing in a conversational tone is the best way to write a blog and how you can get inspired to write more on your blog.

You will also learn about repurposing your blog in different formats, so you will never run out of content materials on social media and other platforms.

Blogging is a slow process. It happens gradually. But I learned that it can be quite rewarding to keep creating your own content.

And this content creation week will teach you the best way to start creating content and grow your personal brand in the process.

Now, that you are done with content creation, here comes the sixth week – social media week.

In this week, Deepak will teach you how you can leverage social media to build your brand and gain more authority.

Unlike other marketing gurus, Deepak will not teach you techniques to gain 1000+ followers and become a social media expert.

Because it’s a hard fact that social media platforms own your followers and customer data. They can easily ban you or suspend your social account for doing something fishy unintentionally. 

But this week is not about removing social media completely. Instead, Deepak will mainly teach you how you can leverage the reach and followers of social media to grow your brand and invite your most interested followers into your closed group. 

Social media is a great channel to leverage if you know how to convert your follower into paying customers or your loyal fan.

Now, after social media, at seventh week, comes the part which is the most important for any business or marketers – Lead Generation.

As you know that without leads, no businesses can survive. So, this week Deepak will teach you about some of the best ways to generate leads and get them on the call with you.

Here, Deepak will teach about creating lead magnets, CATT (content attention, trust, and transaction) funnel, and how you can leverage it to generate leads.

You will also get to know about B2B leads and how it is different from B2C leads.

You will then get to learn that you can do outreach to the proper type of customers to get leads.

And also which type of leads actually require the use of funnel (Hint: Many extreme cases of leads don’t actually need a funnel. In that case, you have to either do full-on marketing or outreach to them directly).

So, Deepak will not only teach you tools and techniques to approach the right lead but also will tell you which technique to use when, while doing outreach for lead generation.

If you want some glimpse of lead generation, then check out this 3 hours video on lead generation here.

Now comes the eighth week, where he talks about SEO (Search engine optimization).

Here, also, unlike other marketers, Deepak will take you through fundamentals and will teach how that how SEO actually works.

You might get inspired to make your own search engine also (let me know if you did 🙂 ).

He will teach you that how Google (like any other search engines) search the web for information and provide you with relevant results. 

And how you can take that knowledge of working of Google and use it as an added advantage to rank your blogs or website in google for free.

Many tend to neglect SEO but SEO is one of the most important things to learn as it gives you free traffic and Deepak taught it nicely on how to get traffic from SEO.

Now, comes the Facebook ads week (week Ninth) where Deepak will teach you how to run Facebook ads effectively to get possible leads.

Deepak has done crores of rupees of Facebook and googles ads (still doing it).

So, he is one of the best people to learn advertisement from.

You will get to know different types of Facebook ads, which you can run according to your business need.

Facebook is also called outbound advertisement where you reach out to people in their newsfeed to show ads. 

But it’s one of the most effective tools to generate leads and Deepak will teach the most basic tools and techniques available in Facebook ads, to help you get started and run ads.

Now, comes the Tenth week, which is about Google ads.

Unlike Facebook ads, Google ads have both outbound and inbound marketing.

It is inbound marketing by means of showing ads, depending on what people search on Google. This means that Google can bring highly interested buyers to any business when done correctly.

It also has outbound marketing by means of showing ads during youtube streaming, display ads, banners, etc.

So, Deepak will teach you how you can leverage these different ad techniques of Google Ads to get more leads and sales for any business.

Then in the eleventh week, comes the marketing automation part.

If you are already on the email list of Deepak, you might have seen how Deepak nurtures his email list by sending out emails and forming deep connections.

It feels like he’s talking to you personally through his emails. So, in this Deepak will teach some of the basic techniques to start with automation using email marketing tools, zapier, etc.

Any business needs to learn automation to grow exponentially and Deepak will teach you to get started in automation.

Now, here comes the last week – Sales and copywriting, in the twelfth week.

I think copywriting and sales are the most important part of marketing as without convincing your prospective customer, you can’t grow your business at all.

So, Deepak will teach you some of the best techniques to write a sales copy so that you will increase the chances of convincing your prospective customer and get some sales.

Copywriting is one technique that is used in all parts of marketing – from social media to ads.

Because without a convincing copy, you will not be able to convince your customer and you will not get sales.

So, Deepak will share some of the best copywriting tips to help you get started on it.

Deepak will share those 7 triggers of sales and how you can use them in copywriting to increase the chances of getting more sales.

This is one of the most important weeks if you really want to grow as a true marketer without being pushy to your customers.

Then comes some bonus weeks where Deepak will teach you stuff like getting a job as a marketer, getting freelancing gigs, etc., which will help you apply your skills for someone else.

Bonus week may extend up to sixteenth week.

You will definitely get one of the great experiences in this internship and get to meet some of the awesome like-minded people in the community.

This internship is for all levels of marketer..

For beginners, it can a great starting point as this internship will touch upon all techniques of marketing.

And for expert marketers, who are not sure how they can grow as a marketer, this internship will give you a good path to follow and grow as a marketer.

If you want to apply to it free of charge then apply here. 

As a batch 3 intern, I attended the second class. These are the following things I learned:-

1. Marketing is all about having a good conversation.

If you are able to make a good 1:1 conversation then you can easily do 1:many also.

You have to do a good conversation as you converse to your good old friends. For eg- whenever I talk to my college friends, I usually can talk about anything under the sun without being judged.

And come to think about, that’s how you really should be talking in marketing also.

2. Be authentic to communicate better.

Most of the time our society always tries to tell us the “right” way of doing things. Like never talk back, always respect your elders. Never fight, think about your reputation., etc.

But somewhere along the line, you build up your own fake personas to follow those so-called “rules” of the society.

This comes in the way of communicating your real self.

Plus people are already tired of fake people with social personas. So, they don’t feel that connection from you.

So, be authentic in communication. Try to show your true self.

For eg – I really felt a connection with Deepak when he joked around the engineering part and having “girlfriends’.

Because he was being authentic and showing his true self.

And as an engineer, I had also experienced that sitting in the backbench part while having no girlfriends,  even though I was from Computer science.

3. How to be a better marketer?

Unlike any other profession, marketing is one profession where you don’t need to have a formal professional experience. You can be a better marketer just by having more life experiences.

This may include Traveling anywhere in the world, or Learning new languages, or maybe trying social work or Joining new meetup groups.

Do new things all the time.

Read all kinds of books including feminism, religion, etc., especially on a topic you hate the most.

In the end, try not to have a strong opinion of any subject. Be open to change your mindset.

4. About target audience

Always define your specific target audience.

This includes their goals and values.

Their demographics (name, age, gender, marital status, age of children, etc.), challenges or pain points they are facing, their main sources of information, and possible objections they might have with your product.

Then think of your target audience as a single person, while writing for them.

At the end of the day, everyone is alone with their device. So, try to join the conversation already having in their mind.

That’s why email/messaging is the most powerful way to communicate.

5. Say no to complex words or jargon.

Simple words appeal to the masses. And that’s what you want to do to build MassTrust.

Maybe, that’s why Donald Trump won the US election using his “make America great again” speeches.

So, the quickest way to join the conversation already having in your customer’s mind is to always use simple words.

6. Grow your business profitable and predictably using the Law of Large Numbers.

During the internship class, Deepak sir also introduced an interesting theorem, called – Law of large numbers.

So, what is the Law of Large Numbers? And how it’s connected to growing your business?

Well, according to Wikipedia, “According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value and will tend to become closer to the expected value as more trials are performed.”

In simple terms, you can predict your revenue growth in your business, as you collect a large amount of sales data.

Let me give you a simple example.

Suppose your team of 100 salespeople make 10,000 calls per month.

And out of 10,000 calls, only 10% gets converted into a client.

So, if you kept the number of salespeople constant in the coming months, then your salespeople will always convert around 10% of clients only, for every 10,000 calls.

The same thing applies to your Facebook and Google ads campaign metrics.

And this is how you can predict your revenue growth.

For more information, read this awesome article from DigitalDeepak.

7. Customer Avatar

Being an eCommerce enthusiast, I decided to survey an average online buyer.
And from my survey, I got 10 responses.

Out of which, 50% of the online buyers are aged 25-30.

60% of online buyers are male.

Most of them (30%) are from Bangalore, followed by Kolkata (20%).

And 40% of them don’t check anything after waking up. But 30% of them do check email. So, email is still the best medium, I suppose.

90% of them shop from amazon. So, Amazon’s investment in India is paying off, I guess.

And 50% of them use an app to shop online.

While Cash on delivery is still being preferred by 30% of the buyers, online buyers are also preferring debit card more (30%) to make payments.

60% of the buyers shop for electronics, followed by clothes (50%).

On average, online buyers prefer to spend ₹1000- ₹5000 per order.

And 60% of them expect to ship in 2-5 days.

And lastly, reviews (30%) and brand (30%) is the number one reason for influencing the buyer’s decision.

So, my customer avatar is as follows:-

Ramu is a 25-30 years old male, from Bangalore city. He checks his email first in the morning.

He got an email from his favorite shopping site – amazon, regarding the limited time sale on trendy clothes.

He then opens up his amazon app to shop. After checking the brand and reviews, he bought ₹2000 jeans using his debit card. He expects his jeans to ship in 2-5 days.

Conclusion

In class 2 of the internship, I learned a lot about customer avatar and how it’s useful to know your customer before planning literally anything.

Before leaving, please feel free to comment below your learnings.

And check out my survey here.