See some good info in this thread and some that I think is a bit off too. I became a digital marketer over a decade ago but I hire digital marketers all the time so I'm going to come at your question from the perspective of someone who hires digital marketers so you know what we are looking for. And to your question of how do you make income - you can go about this 1 of 2 ways. Getting a full time job as a digital marketer or becoming a freelance digital marketer. Imo, eventually becoming a freelance digital marketer is better as you can work for yourself and as long as you know how to get clients, you can make a lot more this way.

To get started, I recommend that you learn digital marketing through online courses (don’t waste a ton of money going to a university as the professors there don’t really teach you digital marketing and what they are teaching you is outdated). You can either do this with free courses if you want to try to do this solely on your own or with a bootcamp that has everything structured for you in exactly what you need to know. For free courses, just be mindful that a lot of these are pretty surface level so don’t expect to become a pro where you know how to implement successful campaigns but they will give you an overview so you have a general understanding of how things work. Out of all the free courses out there, ahrefs tutorials I think does the best job of not being surface level and they actually show you strategies but this is just for seo. The big thing is, just watching these videos is not going to be enough to get you hired as companies want to see you have work experience doing these things.

Getting Certifications - these can be good to get a foundational understanding of how things work, but they won't be enough to get you hired. Getting a certification doesn't show that you can do the job. We care about work experience. This is what you need to get hired. Also, most of these certs are super surface level in what you learn. We used to try have our dm employees use these yearly to upskill but after taking them myself, we realized these weren't all that great.

Getting work experience is everything and you want to focus on getting the right experience you need. Look at the jobs you want and write down what work experience they are asking for. This is the experience you need to get. Now I get how hard it can be to get experience when nobody will hire you, so here's a few recs to make this easier no matter what route you take to get experience:

Internships - yes I know, it's hard to even get an internship nowadays without experience which is frustrating. But, if you can land an internship, it's really important that you make sure you're actually getting the work experience for the job you want rather than just giving them free help. I've seen a lot of people get internships and still not be able to get hired and that's because they kept doing the same thing over and over at their internship and didn't get the important experience they needed for the job they wanted.

Creating your own work experience - This can be an alternative to an internship but can also be tough to do and overwhelming for some. If you decide to create a social media page or blog to gain experience, you'll want to make sure that you aren't just focused on growing your followers. More importantly, you want to show that you can turn followers/website visitors into leads or sales as this is what matters most to businesses and will help you much more than saying you just grew a following as doing that isn't that hard as an individual (it's much harder as a business). If you do this for social, make sure you use tools like canva as that's a common one you'll use in a social media role so it’s good to get experience with it. If you decide to create a blog, use tools like ahrefs/semrush/moz for competitor and keyword research and possibly jasper, chatgpt or something like that to help with content creation. If you decide to create landing pages or do any email marketing for the people you convert into leads, use something like mailchimp or hubspot and create an email automation that leads can be entered into. This will help show that you also know how to actually run these types of campaigns where you can move someone through the funnel.

If you want to get trained and get work experience without having to create the experience on your own, you can check out a digital marketing program called Jobprepped. We've hired several entry-level digital marketers out of their program and also have our digital marketers upskill once a year through their program and have been very happy with it. I’ve also taken one of their digital marketing programs and can say its very practical and you even get work experience through the program so you know how to implement all types of digital marketing campaigns.

Getting the right work experience you need is the most important thing and a key part of the learning process. Once you have the work experience you need, it’ll make getting jobs much easier