Marketing. We hear about it a lot on social media, podcasts, YouTube, and blogs. Words like digital marketing, e-com, direct marketing, email marketing, social media marketing. So what exactly is it? Well, if you look it up on Google, the definition is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is the act, set of institutions, and process of creating, communicating, delivering, and presenting an exchange of offers that have value for clients, co-partners, and the society itself. So in layman's terms, marketing is the process of communicating to clients and customers a solution to their problem. Basically, marketing is a way for you to show the value of your product or services to the right clients that could use them. Now, there are two major types of marketing, traditional and modern. Now, traditional marketing is probably what you'd think of when you look at a billboard on a highway, where you see an ad on TV, or you hear an advertisement on the radio. Traditional marketing is typically a spray and prey type of marketing, where you basically send out a message to millions of people knowing full well that only maybe a few thousand or even less might be interested in your product. Oftentimes, the focus of traditional marketing is not so much getting sales, but building brand awareness. Now, traditional marketing is still incredibly important, but there's two major problems with it. One, it's almost impossible for you to track your ROI or return on investment. And two, you're typically paying to show your marketing to a bunch of people who absolutely don't need to see it at all. And this is why over the last 20 years with the rise of the internet and social media, you've seen a steady decline in traditional marketing and the rise of the second one we're going to talk about, which is modern marketing. Modern marketing focuses more on knowing what customers want and need and then delivering that exact product to them. The most common form of modern marketing is known as digital marketing. And with digital marketing, you're able to identify the exact customers that need your product and show your ads only to them. And then you're able to track your return on investment down to the dollar. Some common types of digital marketing are going to be SEO or search engine optimization, SEM or search engine marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and affiliate marketing. As you can imagine, digital marketing is one of the most valuable skills that you can learn, whether you're trying to be an employee, a freelancer or own your own business. And if you're interested in learning more about digital marketing, my friend Seth, who's taught thousands of people how to get jobs in digital marketing as well as become freelancers, did put together a free masterclass, which I'll put down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. You can also check out interviews I've done with people who have landed careers in digital marketing. I'll put that right here.