It was great to have so much expertise all in one place. It's been like school for way less money than I'd pay anywhere else. When I was starting out last year, I didn't know which parts of digital marketing I would enjoy most, so the courses have given me a chance to try everything. Now I feel more confident about niching down to the ones that I like best.
The first course I finished was the SEO course, which is the flagship. Within a couple weeks I had landed my first freelance job on Upwork doing backlinking, and put so much of what I used to work right away for that client. The client was experienced with SEO, and was impressed with the tricks that I'd learned from the course that made the work move faster.
After that I wrote two blog posts for another client after doing keyword research to find terms that had a lot of search volume and not much competition. Those posts rank in the top 20 on Google even without backlinks, and after 7 months, one of them drives almost as much organic traffic to our e-commerce store as the homepage!
I had nearly finished the email marketing course when the update hit, and I am really, really happy with the new content. Web applications have changed a lot in three years, and now the courses are much more up to date. Seeing the comparison between Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and Drip has been very instructive, especially since I have only used Mailchimp up to now. I feel confident about my ability to do work for a client in any of those three ESPs now.
One of the things I LOVE about ClickMinded courses is the inside scoop on 3rd party tools. Every course has turned me on to 3 or 4 tools that blew my mind that I never would have found on my own. It's so helpful to have an expert who can point you to the best options. Some of them I never would have known to look for. Others are in a crowded market, and it has saved me a ton of time to know which 2 or 3 were really worth trying of the 10-15 options out there.
And how can I forget the SOPs - in every course there are a bunch of Google Docs that walk you step by step through the most important procedures in that course as well as Google Sheet templates just like the ones used in the video course. These are easy to save to your own Google Drive for future use.
So much of what is in these courses is intended to make it easy to do the work the first time like someone is walking you through it. When you are learning on your own without a live expert on hand to help and guide you, that is SO helpful. I have been able to put what I've learned from these courses into immediate use for my clients, and highly recommend them to anyone starting work at an agency or with freelance clients who wants to "do it right" from the beginning.
I've written in to support a couple times, and these guys are really on top of their emails. I get a response right away, and have felt really well supported. Great job Tommy and team!!