I'm 100% self-taught. Firstly, gained lot of theoretical knowledge reading blogs, guides, tutorials, ebooks.
Next, I experimented with very low budgets for my own websites.
After that, small business for family friend. It all went surprisingly well and wasn't that hard, really. You just need to be very data-driven and methodical.
Game changer for me was NGO and Adwords grant (https://www.google.com/grants/), which gives you $10 000 per month. You can experiment without fear, trying everything you read or thought about.
When you optimize campaigns and grant limitations are starting being annoying, that's when you are ready for the real big work.
> Be careful about making such broad, and highly inaccurate statements... They really don't help paint you in the best light.
What paints me in good light is my results and my results only. Also, I'm a cool, likable guy :)
I had my share of dealing with agencies and nothing beats knowledge of business goals, internal processes and clientbase and reports honesty while working in-house.
Many agencies exist because it's cheaper to outsource. Just like Indian coders - but quality of work is often questionable.
I stand by my words and refuse all agency work - still, I have many recruiters regularly saying "hi" on LinkedIn.
I did Adwords for 1 person mom shops and bigger companies in industries ranging from tourism and general aviation to jewelry and software development.
It was all profitable. Ad agencies are borderline scammers - they measure traffic and clicks as performance, which makes you to spend more money to increase "performance" and pay more agency fees.
Sometimes I burned $15000 before first conversion, but ROI was always positive in the end.
People launching ads without any experience, redirecting people to homepage and loosing money are the same kind of people trying trade stock market and loosing money, creating their own amateur e-commerce shop and loosing money getting zero customers, hiring high-school nephew for company website etc etc. You need experience, and before that - knowledge.
First, manage your ads in-house. Agencies have no reason to work for your conversions, that's not their business model.
Second, don't treat ads like "we'll slap users with our ad and see what happens". Prepare user flow, conversion funnel, dedicated landing pages, drip campaigns, remarketing etc.
Adwords and Facebook are fully-fledged promotion channels and they have to be treated as such. It's a craft which consultants make huge money from - because they know how to bring profits.
> You're two steps from impersonating the Government
In Poland it's normal practice. You register a company, you get serious looking email from private companies which names are very similar to related government entity which tells you to pay for registration (which is free).
It's going on for years, no consequences for them.
The same about golden and silver coins, gold plated religious stuff - company called freaking "NATIONAL TREASURY" aimed to look like national mint sells this shit for years.
Receiving and sending documents to proofreading
I described them in details here: https://www.netguru.co/blog/automating-myself-out-of-the-job...