Growing with Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree

Few years ago, I’ve started collecting stock market data, researching the price patterns, and testing trading strategies. I went through multiple free and paid courses, read a number of books, and, of course, I’ve used the accumulated knowledge for stock trading. Since my educational and professional background is software engineering, I’ve decided to create software that will recognize favorable market situations and generate trading signals. I went through a long process of testing, learning, and refining my algorithms, I finally found the approach that worked. After several months of using these signals for my own trading, I’ve decided to open it to the public. This is how the stocksbuyalerts.com project was born. In this article, I’d like to share why I decided to take the Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program.

There were several complications I needed to overcome. First, I needed to improve the quality of my alerts. I’ve signed up for Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree and Machine Learning Nanodegree provided by Udacity. Those courses helped me to use cutting-edge Deep Learning algorithms to select the market situations when the stock price is about to start growing with a high probability. Second, I needed to deliver the alerts to my subscribers instantly. Unfortunately, the e-mail alerts sometimes were delivered with a few minutes delay, which was not acceptable for time-sensitive information. The solution was to create my own app, and this is where the Udacity’s Android Developer Nanodegree helped me a lot. During the course I’ve learned the app development principles, obtained new connections for my LinkedIn profile, and, the most important, developed my own apps under the guidance of Udacity’s mentors.

Finally, when all parts were in place (efficient stock tracking engine, delivery app, and the website to attract subscribers), the remaining piece of the puzzle was to promote the website and my content to get more subscribers. Guess where did I find a solution?

Digital Marketing Nanodegree by Udacity

I’ve joined the Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree program last month and there are several early outcomes I can share so far.  First, I started to respect the work digital marketers do even more. It’s not an easy task to achieve the required results in the chaos of the digital world. Second, I’ve already made some changes recommended in the course for my website and it helped to improve the SEO ranking and the conversion rate.

Finally, the thing I like the most about the DMND is that the learning process triggers the creative thinking. For example, after watching the Content Strategy chapter, I started thinking how to make my content more interactive. I came up with an idea to create a simulation of intraday stock trading based on the alerts my system produces. This hypothetical trading tool will help my website visitors to understand my product better and will improve the behavioral factors for SEO.

Being a solopreneur means that you must wear several hats at the same time.  Fortunately, Udacity provides an affordable way to get contemporary knowledge in the selected area, broaden your professional network, and apply the knowledge in the area of your interest. Personally, I’ve decided to take the DMND course because I had a positive experience with Udacity before, and I knew that it will help me to achieve my marketing goals. And I the program did not disappoint me!