By Brett Bodofsky
Search Engine Marketers have skills that are found to be of value by many communities. People within the marketing community, students and non-profit organizations can all benefit from your help! This simple guide reviews 10 unique ways you can give back as a Search Engine Marketer.
10 Ways to Give Back:
- Join the Google Ads Help Community and answer users questions
- Create educational videos
- Write educational/informative articles
- Create a podcast related to Digital Marketing
- Host local meetups (via meetup.com)
- Become a mentor
- Speak at local schools
- Join the Paid Search Association
- Participate in #PPCChat conversations (A weekly chat that takes place every Tuesday at 12:00 PM EST.) See: https://officialppcchat.com/ and https://twitter.com/hashtag/ppcchat
- Volunteer for a 501(c)(3)
Google Ads Help Community
The Google Ads Help Community offers an opportunity to help those overcome problems that you have likely faced at some point in your career using Google Ads. Users come here to ask questions about Google Ads and receive answers from volunteer members. Not only does joining the community and answering users’ questions help others, but it can also provide a sense of self satisfaction and earn you some accolades to add to your resume. The community offers a badging system to indicate members’ level of participation (as seen below).
Create Educational Videos
Many people are visual learners, we have an opportunity to help these folks too! There are 2+ billion users per month on YouTube. Knowing this statistic, there is no doubt that there is a healthy portion of users that would be interested in learning about paid search. You could show people step by step how to do something, discuss tactics worth testing, or talk about industry trends.
Tips:
- Use a high quality mic and webcam. There are tons of resources out there, users don’t have time to try and decipher garbled audio and grainy video. (Many people recommend the Logitech C922 Pro Stream as a webcam)
- Don’t give away your company’s proprietary information
- Give your professional opinion if you feel it is necessary, but try to eliminate all biases where possible
- Ensure the information you provide is accurate and concise (be sure to not confuse the viewer with added fluff or jargon)
- Maybe consider looking up a tutorial on how to make tutorials, to help you get started.
Write Educational/Informative Articles
In order to serve the paid search community, you can write content. This content can range from articles about emerging trends in our industry or step by step instructions on how to do something. You can host these articles on your own website or share them with major publications such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and SemRush.
Perhaps take a look at some of the work that the top 50 most influential PPC experts have been putting out for inspiration. But make sure you are being original and not plagiarizing.
Create a Digital Marketing Related Podcast
Hosting or contributing to a digital marketing related podcast is a fantastic way to give back to the community. Marketers with an aptitude to learn more, wouldn’t ignore podcasts as a medium to obtain information. Especially if that marketer has a commute. Each time you listen to a digital marketing related podcast you’re likely to learn something new. Not only will you learn something new, but you’re also likely to become more confident in your ability to speak/communicate about digital marketing topics yourself. If you are a marketing professional that can speak fluently, confidently and keep things entertaining you should certainly consider creating a podcast! You’d be surprised how many people may be able to benefit from the knowledge you have to share.
Look to the following for inspiration:
The Paid Search Podcast
Google Partners
PPC Rockstars
The Art of Paid Traffic
Perpetual Traffic
Host Local Meetups
Start a monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly meet up with others who share interest in your paid search passion. Starting a meetup group connects you with passionate people looking to share ideas, learn, and well… get out of the house. You can use this platform however you like whether you want it to be collaborative in nature or pure education sessions where you teach those who are interested in the marketing space. Meetup.com would be a great place to start organizing a local meetup! Please note that Meetup.com also offers the ability to organize events hosted online as well.
Become a Mentor
Mentoring is a great way to give back to the paid search community. There are tons of people out there that want to learn paid search but just don’t know where to start, what to do, or how to do it. We as professionals can help them! Dedicate as little or as much time as you want in order to provide support to those who need it. Not only does the mentee benefit a ton, but you as the mentor also will gain valuable leadership and communication skills throughout the process. Interested in becoming a mentor?
To find someone who you can mentor check out https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/, https://www.builtbygirls.com/ or reach out to your network to see if anybody would be interested.
Speak at a Local School
Speaking at a local high school or college could be something of interest to both students and professors. More and more schools are offering web development, programming and marketing courses. While professors may be teaching students how to create websites, it’s possible that students could use some information about how to drive traffic to their website outside of SEO. If you reach out to a marketing professor, your value prop could be that you currently work in the industry and can provide valuable insight into what a day in the life of a marketer is like. It can’t hurt to reach out to local professors who teach these subjects and see if they would be interested in you providing insight into industry or giving a brief glimpse into the world of paid media. Doing this can also immensely improve your public speaking skills.
Join the Paid Search Association
Although relatively new, the Paid Search Association has made a promise to help others grow and advance in the paid search industry. The association plans to do this by providing all of those who are involved in paid search with services and information aimed at advancing individuals and organizations. You can start contributing today by signing up and creating/responding to posts on the members’ forums.
Learn More
#PPCChat
#PPCChat is a popular twitter hashtag, but more importantly is a weekly Twitter chat that typically focuses on Paid Search related topics. Matt Umbro started it in 2011 and Julie Friedman Bacchini (@neptunemoon) is now the host. Don’t be shy, the #PPCChat community is filled with so many friendly and brilliant folks! What’s great about PPCChat is that not only can you follow along with the topic and see what other people have to say, but you can also provide responses and gain some visibility for your personal brand.
Volunteer for a 501(c)(3)
Donate your time to nonprofits who need digital marketing help. This is a great way to build your resume while doing good for others. You may be able to have a significant impact on your community and the 501(c)(3) that you decide to volunteer with, especially if they are not already utilizing the $10,000 per month Google Ad Grant! Sart by reaching out to your network to see if anyone knows of an organization in need of this kind of service. Or you could try checking out https://www.catchafire.org/ and https://www.upwork.com/.
About the Author: Brett is a Senior Paid Media Specialist at Elumynt, with over 8 years of experience running paid search campaigns for B2B and B2C companies, in a variety of verticals. He is a Silver Google Ads Product Expert with a passion for providing consumers the best experiences possible. In addition to being passionate about the consumer, he is also dedicated to participating in the marketing community and helping out wherever possible.
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