How I Built a Digital Marketing Career With Zero Guidance – and Why I Teach Digital Marketing Differently Because of It
If you’d told 22-year-old me that I’d spend my life teaching digital marketing and AI skills, I would have laughed at you. I had a completely different plan. Life had other ideas – and looking back now, I’m grateful it did.
I want to tell you the whole story, not the polished version. Because I think if you’re a business owner wondering if it’s too late to learn this stuff, or a beginner digital marketer feeling lost, or someone working in policy or development wondering how digital skills actually change lives -I think you’ll find yourself somewhere in here.
It started with a blog
Before any of this was a career, it was just me and my friends running a blog together – uhidaya.blogspot.com. It’s still up today, if you want to see where this all began. We weren’t building anything strategic. We were just writing, talking to each other, figuring out our voices. But I think that blog is the truest, happiest version of me that’s ever existed. I didn’t know it at the time, but everything I’ve done since has, in some way, been me trying to find my way back to that feeling – the feeling of writing something and having people actually respond to it.
Eventually, life pulled us in different directions, the way it does. We all had to move on to the next stage.
The high of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the low that followed
I have a Bachelor’s degree in political science, with a minor in sociology. My first big stop after the blog was an internship at Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – and I loved it. I mean loved it. Cocktails, policy conversations, meeting ambassadors, feeling like I was close to something important. I was thriving.
When it ended, I was bright-eyed and completely convinced my career was about to take off. I wanted to land in a nonprofit, work on policy, make real impact.
Instead, I got a job at an architectural firm. And it broke something in me.
I walked in still carrying all that hope from the Ministry, and within weeks I was a glorified messenger – sent from place to place delivering mail, learning nothing, growing nothing. Then, two weeks in, I was called into the office and told my salary was being cut from 35,000 to 15,000 shillings. Just like that. I remember sitting there thinking, is it because you’ve noticed I’m young? Is it because you knew I’d already committed? It didn’t feel like a demotion. It felt like I’d been taken advantage of.
I was depressed. Commuting every day to a place I dreaded, doing work that meant nothing. But I recognized it early, and I refused to let that be the end of my story. So I sat myself down and asked one honest question: if you could do anything at all, what would actually make you happy?
The answer was already inside me. The blog. The writing. Building something with people I loved.
Teaching myself digital marketing to get paid for it
So I asked myself something bolder: could I actually get paid to do that? I searched online and found academic writing – and just like that, I had a way to earn a living doing what I loved. I wrote about everything: physics papers I’d never studied, subjects I knew nothing about the day before. During peak seasons, I was making 200,000 to 300,000 shillings a month. It wasn’t a bad life at all.
But somewhere in there, I asked myself a harder question: when I’m 35, will I still be doing other people’s homework? I’m 35 now, and I remember exactly how much that thought scared me back then. Academic writing was a job. I wanted a career.
So I went digging again, and this time logic led the way: a website needs someone to maintain its content – I learned that that’s what professionally referred to as copywriting. And that content needs to actually be found on search engine like Google and people will pay you to ensure that happens – I, again, learned that that’s what called search engine optimization.
The moment I understood what SEO actually was, I knew. This was it. This is what I’d been circling my whole life without knowing its name. I made a promise to myself that I would do everything possible to learn SEO and make a career out of it! Finally! A career to work towards!
Here’s the part I don’t think people expect: there was no one to teach me. Literally no one, not in Kenya, not that I could find. So I taught myself from YouTube – Neil Patel, Eric Siu, and later the channels that tools like Ahrefs started putting out. I’d watch, and watch, and watch. And then I hit a wall: watching wasn’t the same as knowing. I could consume a hundred videos and still not know what to actually do.
So I figured that if I truly wanted to master this thing, watching Youtube videos wasn’t actually helping me DO. So i decided to build a website that I could then practice with. I remember that I had to save up to afford a theme and hosting. But I was determined. I built my first WordPress website from tutorials, and forced myself to apply what I was learning as I learned it -not after, alongside.
Even then, I made a mistake that took me a while to notice: I had taught myself SEO, but I hadn’t taught myself marketing. When it came time to actually find clients, I had no idea where to start. I had to go back to the drawing board all over again – learning, through pure trial and error, that marketing has target audiences, that you can’t speak to everyone at once, that knowing your craft and knowing how to sell it are two completely different skills. I think that lesson alone has saved me more time than almost anything else I’ve learned.
Building an SEO career in Kenya that no one around me understood yet
It was 2012, 2013 – and Kenyan businesses simply weren’t ready to invest in SEO. I tried. I offered my services for as little as 15,000 shillings and still got turned away, because most people didn’t understand what they’d be paying for.
So I knew that if I wanted to actually work professionally as an SEO, the market in Kenya would give me much less or not give me the chance at all. I knew that internationally, businesses were investing in SEO and were looking for qualified SEO professionals.
What I found so appealing about SEO as a career is that it didn’t matter that I was based in Kenya. All the clients wanted were writing samples from me and I had plenty. So that’s how I went international. I found early freelance platforms and started writing – comparison articles that would end up on Amazon review sites like these, “best of” roundups, travel content about places I’d never set foot in. I loved it. I was living my dream: to wake up each day, write, and be paid for it! I got to learn a little about everything, the same way academic writing had trained me to.
In 2018, sports betting was legalized in the US, and that gave me a steady wave of SEO content work that carried me right up to the pandemic. Around then, I took a deliberate, well-earned maternity break. I’d saved, I was ready to rest.
Where TAG Creative Digital Marketing Agency comes in
While all of this was happening, in the background, was my boyfriend – now husband – Gitonga “Tosh” Ruchiami. Tosh has a degree in graphic design and had already built his own business, Tosh At Graphics: logos, publications, event branding, pure creative and design work.
At some point, after I’d taught myself digital marketing, it hit me – Tosh is doing graphics. People on social media need graphics and strategy. Why are we working apart? So instead of running parallel, I joined Tosh At Graphics and brought digital marketing into it. I set up our socials, our profiles, our Google Business Profile – the digital backbone of the company itself. That’s how TAG Creative became TAG Creative Digital Marketing.
Bringing digital marketing into what Tosh had already built transformed the business. We’ve won awards. We’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in Kenya – brands I grew up watching – and I now handle their marketing and campaigns personally. It still amazes me sometimes.
The COVID-19 pandemic, and becoming a digital marketing coach & trainer
Then COVID happened – and something I never expected happened alongside it. The same Kenyan business owners who’d turned me away years earlier came back, desperate now, needing to understand the online world they suddenly depended on to survive.
That’s how I became a teacher. I built a curriculum from nothing – Business Booster Academy – because for years I’d been quietly learning from people like Amy Porterfield, Marie Forleo, and Neil Patel, absorbing not just what they taught but how they taught it, always secretly hoping I’d get to do the same someday. I did.
Six months into running that academy, I found FinnChurchAid’s Creative Industries Program, which was looking for a digital marketing instructor with real teaching experience and their own curriculum. That was me, exactly. I got the job, and it became the fullest circle of my life – teaching business owners the exact skills I once needed as a struggling business owner myself, and teaching beginner digital marketers everything I wished someone had told me when I was lost and starting out.
Today, my track has the highest success rate in the entire program, teaching youth across Nairobi -including Jericho – and in Kakuma refugee camp.
I’ve watched a student who couldn’t turn on a laptop start earning 3,000 to 4,000 shillings charging for company profiles — by week six. That’s not a statistic to me. That’s what digital skills actually mean: agency, income, a way out. I believe, completely, that these skills should be accessible to everyone — especially people in the hardest situations. Survivors of abuse. Teenagers who’ve never been given a real chance. Digital skills can be that chance.
Why I’m telling you all of this now
This last year, I got sick. Sicker than I have ever been.
In and out of hospital since July, more times than I can easily count. And strangely, that season is what pushed me to finally commit, fully, to this brand, this teaching, this mission – because I understood, in a way I hadn’t before, that time isn’t guaranteed and the work I care about most can’t keep waiting.
And lying in that hospital bed, I made myself a promise. I told myself: if I get the chance to get better, I am not going to waste it. I am going to help more people. More business owners. More beginner digital marketers. And I’m not going to do it in four-month bursts, the way a program like Creative Industries runs – I’m going to do it full time, all the way through, for as long as I’m able.
I started getting better around May 2026. And everything I’ve done since then has been me making good on that promise.
Here’s what I actually believe, all the way down: digital and AI skills are some of the most important skills a person can have right now – and they are nowhere near accessible enough to the people who need them most. Not to marginalized youth. Not to beginner entrepreneurs. Not to small agribusinesses trying to survive. Not to communications people trying to keep up with a world that’s changing every few months. This gap is real, and I’ve decided it’s mine to work on.
That’s why we launched Learn to Earn – our digital skills empowerment program, built to put these skills in the hands of people who’ve never had access to them. And it’s why capacity-building training is something TAG now takes seriously as a core part of what we do, not a side project – working with beginner entrepreneurs, agribusinesses, and communications professionals who need practical, usable digital and AI skills, not theory.
I want to build partnerships that let this work grow past what one program cycle or one classroom can do. I want to be in rooms with organizations like Mastercard and the ILO – not to be seen, but because that’s where decisions get made about how digital and AI skills reach the people who need them most, and I want a seat at that table, speaking from actual experience, not theory.
At the center of it, it’s simple. I just want to teach. I want to keep doing what I did in that hospital bed and promised myself I would – help as many people as I possibly can, for as long as I’m given the chance to.
If you’re reading this because you’re thinking about learning digital marketing for your business – or you’re already learning from me, or you’re about to join one of our programs – I wanted you to know this story before anything else. I wanted you to understand exactly where I’ve come from.
I have been exactly where you are. Confused, self-taught, figuring it out one YouTube video at a time, wondering if I was even doing it right. And I can take you from there to wherever you’re trying to go.
So if you’re looking for a digital marketing coach – someone who won’t overcomplicate it, who’ll actually explain how all of this works – I would love to help. And now you know why.
Get in touch for digital marketing coaching:0707-380-879!
