WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL ENGINE!
We are thrilled you have joined us this semester. Before we begin, you probably have some questions about The Digital Engine. What is it? What are we going to be doing? Let’s take a brief tour of what your semester will look like and how to use the courseware.
The Digital Engine is a college course that will teach you how to create an organic, digital marketing campaign in order to funnel leads through your very own website. It has taken many years to build this philosophical model, teaching pedagogy, and online delivery system. Through multiple iterations of this process, we have discovered that the best way to teach inbound marketing is through a live practicum. This practicum will allow you to create your own inbound marketing campaign complete with a functional website, social media acquisition channels, and an email retention process. This model has been used on real business clients for years, and now we are bringing it to you in a college setting. You will learn valuable skills for the digital marketplace, including:
- How to build an active and engaging website using WordPress (more about this below),
- How to create and plan a content matrix and rolling editorial calendar,
- How to create and curate blog content on your website,
- How to link blog content to social media acquisition channels,
- How to run an email campaign to produce consumer retention, and
- How to monitor and audit digital analytics (like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights) for continuous improvement to increase web traffic and lead acquisition.
These skill sets are at the peak of needs for many companies in today’s global digital economy. Your skills in WordPress alone could land your next internship or job opportunity. If you haven’t used WordPress or never heard of it, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that uses a wide selection of software tools to make website building easy and accessible to everyone, no matter your web coding skill. The Swiss-Army Knife of web building, WordPress allows the most novice of users to turn a website into an online shop, photo gallery, news website, or anything you could imagine. The skills you are about to acquire and/or refine provide you a considerable leg-up in the digital marketing world. If you don’t believe us, consider these WordPress facts from TechJury:
- WordPress is the leading CMS in the market, owning 62% market share. The next closest is Shopify at 5.4%.
- Of the billions of websites on the Internet, WordPress websites make up 30% of all sites. That’s roughly 455M sites.
- Companies that use WordPress include: Sony, Walt Disney, MTV, BBC, the New Yorker, among many others.
- 62% of the fastest growing companies in the US use WordPress.
- Over 500 new WordPress sites are created DAILY.
- Seventy million new blog posts are created every month using WordPress.
- WP Plugins make WordPress so popular and user-friendly, including WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Akismet, Ninja Forms, among many others that we will use in this course.
- There are many more benefits to learning and using WordPress, of which you can learn about by clicking the TechJury link above to read the full article.
We provide you this information to demonstrate that we believe this will be the most applicable class that you will ever take at your institution. It will provide you an incredible library of resources to get that start in digital marketing that everyone needs. Whether you will be a graduate in the field of marketing, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, music business, mass communications, or any other specialty program that requires the creating and distribution of content, you will appreciate the skill sets that you will learn in this course.
So get ready… It’s going to be a fast-paced semester, and you have a lot to learn. But keep this Ethic in mind: “If you work hard, you will do well!” We have learned through teaching this course for many years that your success will be determined by your work ethic. There is a lot of work on the front end to get started correctly, but there is also a lot of work throughout the campaign practicum to maintain your progress throughout the course. But the hard work will truly payoff in the end with a fully functional website and digital campaign that will be attracting readers and followers alike, hopefully for many YEARS to come. Yes, at the end of the course, you can choose to keep your site running and operational. In fact, we have had many students turn their class practicum into very successful businesses and/or organizations for a cause. The sky is the limit for what you can dream of and accomplish in this course, so get your thinking hat on. You need to already be thinking about what kind of practicum you want to create. Consider what is your favorite thing to do, or read about, or perform, or create and think about how you will build a website this semester that will support those ideas and goals.
The ultimate reality about this course is this: Some of you will LOVE this class and some of you will HATE it. Some of you will decide halfway through the class that you want to work in this field and some of you will decide that you never want to do this again. But the truth is that this is where the jobs are hot! These are the skills that will land you a job, unequivocally. So be prepared, you will get out of this course what you put into it. I hope you will choose to dive all in, head-first into this opportunity to build something special for yourself.
Our CHALLENGE to you: Work Hard – Play Hard!
These skill sets will be invaluable to you in the future, we promise! Whether you are starting your own company, working for a small startup, medium-sized business, or in a multi-department conglomerate, your knowledge of this process will never go underutilized in this digital economy. So congratulations, we believe you have made a very wise investment in your future, and we are excited to be a part of your journey.
Next, let’s discuss some important principles on how this course will be taught and how the courseware functions.