So that’s it then. Ten weeks have literally flown by (as they so often do) and it’s time to look back on what I’ve learned from the course. I’ve learned a lot in the last ten weeks, though admittedly many of the technical things like Google Analytics, click-through-rates and metatags are less relevant to me and have been difficult to fully understand. However, I’ve found the course to be unbelievably helpful in other respects – networking for one.

In a way I feel like a bit of an anomaly. I’m not the kind of person you might expect to find on a search and social media marketing course. We’re all on the course for different reasons though.  I mean, I don’t own a business, I don’t work for a company nor do I consider myself particularly professional.  I’m not the most technically gifted of people and my sales technique is awful. And yet, despite my lack of business acumen, I’m coming away from this course far better off than when I started and with a clearer line-of-sight as to where I want to take my career.

As for this blog post, well, how can I put it into words to describe my experience? Maybe I should stick to what I know – telling a story. As a journalist it’s what I’ve been trained to do. Though, to give a better understanding of where I’m at now, as a graduate of SSMM, I first need to put things into context.

Sadly, it’s not a story with the most positive of beginnings.  2012 began with me entering my fifth month on the dole and life had come to a standstill. I was going nowhere. I decided to leave Leeds, my home for the previous 7 years, and return to Manchester to study for my NCTJ.  It’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made. I retrained and refocused. I opened doors for myself that were once shut and pledged there and then never to walk into a Jobcentre Plus…ever again.

Retraining as a journalist brought me up to speed with writing online; writing SEO-friendly headlines, writing to an industry standard, making use of different web apps and social media to construct a story or locate a source, working to tight deadlines, live-blogging, approaching new people, building up a contacts list and learning to nurture each new connection I made.  It also taught me to give myself an online presence – to get on twitter, to get on Linkedin, to utilise social media and write authoritatively. It was a fun time indeed (minus the 13 hours of shorthand a week).

As the old saying goes, what goes up must come down and inevitably the honeymoon period of being a trainee journalist came to an end in July 2012. It was time to look for a real job as a reporter.  This turned out to be more difficult that I‘d imagined. I could blame it on the economy but that’s an easy cop out. Perhaps I didn’t look good enough on paper. Perhaps I just wasn’t trying hard enough. Either way, it was back to the old day-job at the NHS for me until I found a way in.

As the months dragged on with no real openings into a paid reporter’s role I began to question whether that career path was really for me.  I wasn’t writing much at all, and any writing I was doing was voluntary.  Would I still be typing clinical letters this time next year? How much longer would I find myself struggling to listen to medical terminology in broken English?

By this point a friend of mine had been badgering me for some time to come and work for him. He said he could use a good writer to write blogs for him and his clients businesses, as well as do some in-house SEO.  He kept saying ‘content is king’. This slowly started to sink in as I read around the subject more, I began seeing the word ‘content’ everywhere I looked.  I asked myself, can I do content? Can I be the king of content? That’d be nice.

Given that my SEO knowledge was minimal at best, I decided some more tuition was required. I came across the Search and Social Media Marketing course and after a short while deliberating; I booked myself onto the foundation course. It was around this time that I read a very interesting article on the Guardian website. It was all about content marketing and how it’s a good route for journalists to take.

It said that due to the combination of a dying print media undermined by instant communication, coupled with the rise of citizen journalists and bloggers, few qualified journalists actually work in Journalism. It also stated that this route could be more financially secure and the skills gained in a newsroom could be put to good use in a marketing setting. This gave me some real inspiration.

If you’ve gotten this far in my blog, you’re probably thinking…’yeah ok Kev…nice story! What does this have to do with search and social media marketing?’

Well, everything and nothing really.  All the stuff I’ve done in the last year has helped me on the course. Graduating from SSMM is the culmination of my journey thus far. I honestly didn’t envisage myself being here when I walked out of the dole office for the last time.

Learning to network effectively, finding my voice and getting involved in discussion…it’s all made my experience worthwhile. The people on the course and the industry speakers have been brilliant, not only in their advice but in their openness to help me out. Anjlee is week 3 for example informed me of a writers network called Contently, I’d dare say I’d have found out about this without her input. So many doors have opened for me as a result of coming on this course, including some actual paid work through Nikki, the guest speaker in week 2.

And there is more work on the horizon, including working on the website for an independent pharmacy, which is effectively a blank canvass for me to integrate all the SEO stuff I’ve learned from the course.  I can put together the right strategy for the business, primarily looking at how social media can be used to market the different services at the pharmacy.

Who knows where things will spiral from there? But things seem to be working out and that jobcentre plus now seems a million miles away. I really feel I’m doing something good here. It’s current, it’s exciting and I know I can do it.

So that’s my story. Thanks for staying with me through this epic blog post.

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