My awesome 4 months with Digital Scholar, Chennai
It’s amazing how much things have changed since I started my journey to become a full-stack digital marketer with Digital Scholar, Chennai. I’ve been thinking about writing this blog post for a while now. But I wanted to give myself some time till the curriculum gets over. Now, as the curriculum is about to get over, I can write about my awesome four months with Digital Scholar.
Over the last 4 months, I’ve been involved in a lot of different projects and learning experiences. I’ve learned a lot of new things, which have been valuable and insightful. I wanted to share a few of the highlights, and hopefully give you some insight into the value of Digital Scholar, to help you decide whether it’s worth taking a class with them!
I’m sure you have heard of Digital Scholar Online, India’s first agency-styled online digital marketing training program. It is not an online school but a single course that is taught by awesome Digital Scholar Program Instructors(cum practitioners). Who can be the best option to teach you the technical stuff than practitioners who are applying the techniques to solve real-world problems? The course has been designed with the student in mind from the start since the batch is a mixture of the students right from an 18-year-old student to a 65 years old businessman.
My journey started with a content creation tool Canva. The lady who taught us the module herself was an ex-student. She is now earning lakhs by doing freelancing. This module was purely for learning the art of the tool to create visually appealing creatives.
Next, I learned about content writing. My all-time disliked topic you can say. But, the instructor introduced AI-based tools to us which make it easier to write both short-form and long-form content in no time. But, along with that they also taught us the methods or best practices to do content writing. I wrote my first blog (which was too technical) as an assignment for this module. And the fun part was to see how Artificial Intelligence works and creates content for us based on the inputs we give. Team Digital Scholar (I will mention as “Team DS” henceforth in this blog) even gave us access to the paid tool access for 3 months.
As soon as the blog got ready they started the module WordPress Development. Though I am developing WordPress websites for the last four years, this module taught me new tricks and a new builder- Divi. In the beginning, it was difficult for me to get used to this Divi builder as I was comfortable with other builders like SiteOrigin, Elementor, etc. but as time passed I started feeling comfortable. Even I launched my own website www.thegauravsawant.com based on the same builder. Trainer Karthik even taught us E-commerce website as well and how to optimize the site for better results.
Then my favorite module- SEO. Yes, for some people it might be boring; but Karthik trainer made it easy and interesting with his unique style. Right from keyword research, on-page, off-page to technical SEO. Can you imagine learning the in-depth SEO for 3 back to back weekends? It was fun to learn the hacks and apply them to our own website.
After learning and applying the organic way to rank on SERP i.e. Search Engine Result Pages, it was time to learn the in-organic i.e. Paid way to get rank on SERP. Yes, I am talking about SEM (Google Ads). And you will be amazed to know that our instructors were Ex-Googlers. They were from the core team of Google India Hyderabad and current co-founders of Digital Ad Agency based out of Hyderabad. These sessions used to get stretched from 2-hour sessions to 3–3.5 hours and 3-hour sessions to 4–4.5 hour sessions. Like this, we had 3 weekends to learn the Google Ads. I even ran a Google Campaign for one of my clients and experience the magic of Google Ads. It was not as easy a module as it sounds here, those tasks and assignments were some of the toughest among all. But under the guidance of Karan and Sayyed we made it.
After Seach Engine Marketing, it was time to learn some content strategies for Facebook. Basically how to grow your brand organically on Facebook. This module was conducted by sweet Charu ma’am. The checklist and content calendar she shared really helped me a lot for my clients.
After Facebook, there was a module to learn professional social networking site LinkedIn. Here we learned how to optimize our profile and how to run ads too. I worked on a live client of echovMe agency for its assignment. Yes, a live client named Casagrande- a real estate giant.
Later, we had an energetic session with Rishi about E-mail marketing. Here we had hands-on practice on a paid e-mail marketing tool named Active Campaign. I set auto-responders as well for my assignment. It was like magic for my friends on whom I practiced this module.
After the e-mail marketing module, we had a short module on Instagram content strategies, where we learned the best industry practices of Instagram for businesses. I got an opportunity to work on another live client of a parent agency of Digital Scholar here named Vooki- a natural disinfectant brand.
As soon we have done with Instagram, we started connecting the dots of the e-mail marketing module with the Landing Page development followed by Automation. Here we practiced on tools like SwipePages and Pabbly (alternative to Zapier) respectively for Landing Page and Automation. Watching the system automatically does the work for me was an amazing experience. I just had to use my mind to set the flow with conditions and the rest was taken care of by tools.
Currently, when I am writing this blog, we have started with Facebook Ads. And guess who is the trainer for this module? It’s none other than Sorav Jain- one of India’s best digital marketing influencers. I even run one lead generation campaign and generated leads (9 as of now in just Rs. 500).
Still, a few more modules to be covered in the future like Agency Management, freelancing, etc. This means the 3 -month course got stretched to almost 4.5 months. Oh sorry, I forgot to mention that we work as an independent agency for group tasks and Team DS appointed me as Team Leader for Agency 2. And I am having fun and finding the positives and negatives of myself being a leader. I can’t put everything here in words so I must say if you are really interested in learning digital marketing then you should consider Digital Scholar’s 3-month advanced program.
