If you’re a digital marketer like me — passionate about what you do, and constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to grow — you know that the abundance of research that’s being done and published, and the amount of quality content (on various areas of online marketing) that’s being produced nearly hourly is enough to occupy your full day. But most of us just don’t have that spare time to spend studying (or is most of it really spent filtering through the data?)
The answer to the question of “To study or not study?” is obvious enough to leave the interrogative itself in a rhetorical format. Of course, you want to perfect yourself daily. However, unless you decide to focus, you’ll simply have no time for anything else but the study!
One tactic that helps me personally to stay more focused while following the most recent research and publications is following interesting people and companies through my Twitter lists:
As you can see 9 out of my 15 Twitter lists are related to various digital marketing disciplines (e.g.: web anaytics, conversion rate optimization, SEO, paid search, mobile marketing, etc) as well as a couple of general areas such as market research, for example.
At least once every 24 hours I skim through the tweets in each of these categories/lists, and either pick up the information (e.g.: stats) right from the “headline”, or quickly sort out which links to click and read, and which to skip.
What techniques and tactics are you using to navigate your ship in the ocean of all the reading and research that’s available out there?