What does a Internet Advertising specialist do? (SEO, Google AdWords, etc.)?

[Phillip]

I have to answer this because I don't think the previous answers actually give you a good run down on the day to day activities of someone employed in Internet Advertising.

I will give you a break down of my old day to day routines and skill sets.

1. Excel - this is the major tool you will be using to do your decision making, creating campaign drafts and optimisation. Get used to huge spreadsheets and learn pivot tables. This ultimately was a boring part of the job, but you get fairly quick at downloading campaigns and results into Excel, analysing / modifying and uploading again. Apart from the intuition you will gain from experience, being efficient in Excel will help you stand out.

2. Client Relationship - building excellent rapport and communications with the client was essential to help set goals and kpi's. In internet marketing you may brain storm a fantastic idea that you will need to get the client on board with. Running experiments on a campaigns even with the goal of improving requires a very solid relationship and cooperation with the client.

3. Proposals - part of the role was analysing prospects websites and campaigns. This involved going over businesses websites, landing pages and campaigns searching for opportunities and scoping out the work involved.

4. Outreach - prospecting good link placements requires a fair bit of salesmanship I guess. But you will learn this from experience and personally I never found it very taxing or skilful. Part of any good internet marketer should be being fairly involved in the community so contributing articles and getting to know bloggers and industry leaders gets you most of the way there.

5. Reporting - timekeeping for your boss and results for the client. Reporting is very important as you are accountable for every action you take or hour you spend. From my experience true transparency is the key. If you have looked at the campaign, report it, if there was a decline in performance, definitely report it, clients need to know you can be trusted and your seniors need to know what you are up to, even if it is spending two hours on a proposal that never went through.

Hope this helps, I will say it was a very rewarding job with a lot of repetition but some truly fantastic moments.