There are certainly a lot of resources out there to learn digital marketing, SEO, PPC, and paid social. While there's a lot of great information out there, there's a lot of misinformation out there, as well.

In my 20+ years of digital marketing (I was trying to get rankings on Altavista back in 1996), I've learned that the best way to learn digital marketing is by actually practicing it and doing it. You can certainly learn the basics, and this springboard curriculum is a good start. I hope they can keep with the updates, though, as even the "best practices" are constantly changing. The ways you optimized a website 5 years ago are different now, and some techniques are considered spam.

Start with the basics, learn what you can, and then learn by actually putting what you learned into practice. Create your own website. Create your own blog. You'll learn more that way.

I also have never seen springboard like someone else has commented however here is my two cents: Reading a bunch of articles on the topic will not teach you how to actually become an expert in the topic, it will however give you a better understanding of what people in those fields of work are doing and how they are doing it. I don't think you can learn digital marketing in like an hour or even 10 hours... there's so much going on there're so many tools out there and you have to pick the ones that work better for you. The reason digital marketing meeting is hard is that there are way too many resources and everybody says the same thing but in a different way which gets really confusing for new people who are reading articles on SEO SEM, branding, social media management, advertising etc. All these articles and tutorials are trying to push their own envelope because the marketing tutorials in the marketing articles are written by marketers who ere trying to sell you something

Reading books Doesn't make you an accomplished writer or even a writer for that matter

Check out Lyda.com or other online professional development provider. You will find many different options. We have written about the GIG economy and how free lancers use digital tools to acquire new clients.

https://latechnews.org/los-angeles-gig-economy/

I've tried to learn digital marketing online but the most difficult and funny part about it is that all the teachers are digital marketers, so everyone has a newsletter and an ebook they're trying to sell you. So it's difficult to break in and actually learn how to do digital marketing.

This curriculum was presented better than most - so much so that it was a surprise to be taken to other sites when I opened up a lesson.

Curation of a learner pathway definitely has it's value.

Never seen Springboard. It's an interesting way to put together a course. Just tape together articles in some sort of progressive learning or categorized topics. I like the learning path concept, it helps you easily see where you might be missing some knowledge.

6 second digital marketing ads are trending up and becoming a part of any marketing and advertising budget. t-mobile had great success with their world series 6 second ad spots. https://latechnews.org/six-second-marketing-ads/

Yes, many are trying to sell you something but the amount of content available for people seeking information on digital marketing is enormous.

As a digital marketer, what I've found most lacking in most digital marketing guides and articles is the one-size-fits-all approach. Having worked in-house for a few brands at this point in my career, what works well for business does not work well for another. I've worked for businesses where you'd be hard-pressed to get three sales from Facebook ads a month despite significant spending. I've worked for others where you go through periods where it's almost impossible to fail when spending money on Facebook ads.

My advice is to build a framework/approach to what you're doing so that you can operate with flexibility in any situation. Once you have that, you can better contextualize any article you read and once you're familiar with how the different channels perform/operate for what you're trying to market, you can really contextualize anything you hear/read.

A great start is reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. That book outlines typical channels you can try and acquire customers from. The book advocates casting reels in many lakes, seeing where the easy bites come from and then focus on those.

After traction, Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown is a great next step. That book advocates continuous experimentation to find compounding improvements, e.g. once you find a good acquisition channel, how do you approach improving/scaling it and how do you go about finding new acquisition channels.

IMO the only way to learn is to make a quick Wordpress site on one of those easy 1 click install hosts and start writing content and marketing it. (It's easy to get lost playing with the backend of websites so don't even give yourself the ability to do it)