How to Start a Career in Digital Marketing in 2025

Digital marketing is one of the fastest-growing industries and even during times of uncertainty, jobs in advertising and marketing continued to grow. So today this article I'm going to teach you how to start a career in digital marketing and grow both your knowledge and salary,  I want to walk you through the stages that you might go through in your path to becoming a professional digital marketer.

Create Your Own Website or Blog

Creating your own website gives you your own testing grounds. It lets you get practical experience with marketing strategies without worrying about hurting someone else site. Just choose a niche that you're interested in and create a site using WordPress.

YouTube is literally thousands of tutorials out there to help you get started now. Don't bother overthinking things like what your logo should be. Or how you make money from it. These things can come later, and if you're completely stuffed and create a site that's built around your name.

The important part is that you invest a bit of money into your own website because you're less likely to give up without giving it a fair shot. Now, once you've got your site set up, I highly recommend focusing on just one area of digital marketing.

 Let's go through the pros and cons of a couple popular online marketing strategies. 

 Online ads 

These are great to get immediate traffic to your site, but I wouldn't recommend trying these until you've gotten some experience under your belt. The reason is, that you're more likely to burn through money before you make it. 

 Social media marketing 

This is great if you already have a large following, but if you're just starting out, that is probably. In this case, in my opinion, this is something to consider further down the road. Once you've built a steady stream of traffic and it audience who cares about your work.

 SEO stands for search engine optimization 

The great thing about SEO traffic is that once your ranking, you'll be getting free, passive, and consistent traffic from search engines like Google. Meaning, that you'll be consistently reaching new audiences and experiencing compounded traffic. 

Now, the downside is that it works a lot slower than advertising and social media. But if long-term growth is what you're after, then it might completely biased opinion. SEO is the strategy that I'd recommend starting with because the skills you'll learn are transferable to facets of online marketing.

Learn about the area you want to pursue

The best place to start is by reading or watching a beginner's guide on the topic from a reputable person or company, and we have a lot of tutorials for beginners on our blog. Beginners' guide will help you get a general overview of the marketing method and also act as a hub for subtopics to research after.

While much of the content is. Basically, you can use those as pivot points to go and research those subtopics in further detail.

  Execute the things you learn  

Consuming too much content can and will lead to analysis paralysis where you end up overanalyzing things and end up getting nothing done. So don't bother reading about super technical things like crawl budget or wasting your time on split testing. When you don't even have a meaningful amount of traffic. Instead, focus on mastering the fundamentals.

 SEO fundamentals 

• Keyword research
• Content creation
• Link building

These three things alone will move the needle more than spending hours. Boring if you should use category pages for your blog.

Study up some free digital marketing tools

The first is Google Analytics, which is a web analytics platform that shows you things like the number of people visiting your site. Which pages they go to, how long they stay, and hundreds of other actionable metrics.

The second is Google Search Console, which allows you to see how your website is performing in Google search you can see which pages are indexed in Google, the keywords or site ranks, and four in the websites that link to you.

The third is Ahrefs Webmaster tools. This is similar to the Google Search console. Since we show your site's backlinks in keyword rankings but you, also get access to a website audit tool that will scan your website for common and often easily fixable issues that can be hurting your site's performance.

It's a growing audience that wants to get updates from you. Now, whether you're a student or you're in another job, starting your own site is something you can do on the side. It's going to give you exposure to digital marketing, and it's going to prepare you for the next stage.

Get a job or internship at a digital marketing agency

Getting a job today is different than it was ten years ago before you had to have a degree in marketing, business, or whatever. In order to even qualify. 

But from my experience, tons of digital marketing agencies are more interested in hiring creative people who have produced results. 

Working at an agency is a great way to learn digital marketing fast because you'll have the opportunity to work with people who are ahead of you in your career. It's also a place you can find mentors, and you'll also get a ton of hands-on experience working on various types of clients.

Work your way up to a more senior position. Learn from people in your company, and if your goal is to become independent, then learn how agencies and businesses are run and this will happen naturally as you speak with clients as well as senior-level management.

  Important to note that you shouldn't necessarily give up on your other sites.  

A lot of good companies will actually. Perjeta spends time on your side projects to improve your craft. These are usually the types of people you want to work for because they'll challenge you to become masters of your work.

Consider freelancing

Freelancing is a great way to get more hands-on experience while increasing your income. And if by now you're three-plus years into your digital marketing career and there's a good chance you already have some freelance work lined up for you. the two great things about freelancing after you've got.

• Job or you'll have more experience to do good work for clients.
• You'll still have a steady salary to pay the bills.

If you aren't getting referrals or inbound requests for work, then you can sign up for general sites like Upwork or people per hour and apply for jobs where you think you can do a great job and these jobs will help you build up your personal portfolio.

 if you've chosen something more specialized like copywriting or blogging, then I'd spend time picking up side gigs. Pro Blogger Jobs or other places that attract a specific audience? 

After you've built up a portfolio and somewhat of a positive reputation in your industry, you can consider going full-time into a consultant and the keyword here is considered. 

There's nothing wrong with staying in your job, working your way up, and retiring. Not everyone is meant to be a consultant, and to be framed. Not everyone should be, but those who have really mastered their craft and want to maximize their earning potential generally go on to do one of two things.

  Start their own agency  

• This requires hiring a team and usually involves doing both strategy and execution.

Now one of the great things about agency work is that you can work with a lot of clients at the same time since you'll have teams to manage client accounts.

You're also able to provide more services since your team will likely be diversified and being a one-stop-shop allows you to maximize your earnings potential on upsets. One downside is that it can be quite costly since you're dealing with salaries and potentially office space.

  Do independent consulting  

• From my experience, this has a far better Net margin, and hourly rates often range from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

The downside is that it'll usually be limited in the number of clients you can take. Businesses often hire consultants who specialize in an area to solve higher-level business problems.

So they might just want strategy or just training or just execution. And although you may have a smaller team to handle, the more systematized parts of your business clients will be hiring you for your expertise. So naturally, you'll be limited to the number of clients you can take simultaneously.

 Now, regardless if you go the agency or consulting route, networks will be critical to your success and This is why all of the other steps are important to go through. 

When you create a website, you learn and get practical experience with digital marketing strategy. When you get a job, you learn from those who are ahead of you. 

 When you freelance, you get a feel for what it's like to actually run projects on your own. And as you're creating your personal brand, this helps in developing your network as well as authority in your niche. 

 Two other avenues to consider at this stage 

• Speak at events where your clients might be
• Do a push with. Inbound marketing

Speaking engagements are usually unpaid, but if the room is full of your target audience and you have 30 to 60 minutes to show off your expertise, then it can be an extremely lucrative trip. 

Even though we don't have sales pitches in our content, there's no shortage of requests for consultation. So no matter where you are in your career, it's not too late to start in digital marketing. And just like in any other career, it takes time to learn and grow.

So if you are new then let me turn your attention to all the digital marketing strategies that work for you and keep reading like this. After that, you can make a good decision.