One day, at the start of my senior fall semester of college, I realized that I lacked any valuable skills. The startup I had been working on had folded, and the experience showed me that I knew nothing about marketing (among many other things), and so I decided that I’d try to get good at that at least before graduating.

Over the next few months, I spent most of my time learning everything that I could about digital marketing. Three months in, Justin Mares and I started Programming for Marketers. Four months in, I landed an internship with Zapier on their content team. And nine months after starting to teach myself digital marketing, I was hired by Sumo to start their blog and lead their marketing.

I had a shallow understanding of content marketing going into this process, but I learned over 90% of it within those few months. It was a whirlwind of knowledge acquisition that I’m not sure I’ve felt quite so intensely since then, and it’s led to all of the work that I’ve done in the last two years.

Since then, many readers, students and not, have reached out and asked about how they can learn digital marketing. It’s a field that’s been ravaged by spammy information and bad ebooks, and it’s difficult to know where to start and what’s worth learning. I’ve been giving out some form of this advice for the last two years, so I figured it would make sense to organize it and provide it here for anyone motivated enough to follow it.

This is a system that you can use to teach yourself digital marketing in a few months using mostly inexpensive resources and personal projects. I’d expect that anyone could take a game plan like this and go from zero to hireable digital marketer in 6 months or less, so long as you work hard at it and don’t get too distracted.