How can a newbie get into SEO and SEM Industry?

You can not just sit behind your computer every day and expect that people from all over the world will magically find you and invest their money in your products, programs, and services. You must get dressed and get out of the house! If you can commit to talking to at least three different people about your business everyday, you'll be amazed at the change you'll see in your clients, your stress, and your income.

You need to do your research, find out where your ideal clients go to network, learn, and grow their businesses -- and you need to go there too!

Social media is a long-term marketing strategy with a long lead generation cycle. Typically people will follow you on Twitter, or be friends with you on Facebook for months or even years before they finally decide to hire you or buy from you. That's why you need to be ever-present on the social networks you can commit to. Be there with great, valuable, helpful content, answer questions, assist others, join in conversations, be engaged.

Failure to follow up is one of the most common ways that entrepreneurs and business owners sabotage their own success by simply not collecting the money on the table. Millions of dollars are lost by businesses around the world every year simply because they get busy and they fail to follow up with leads from networking events, conferences, social media, email, voicemail, referrals, and more. If you want or need to make more money, fix your follow up and you'll see an increase in your bottom line.

When new prospects are visiting your website, they want to see that you understand what they are struggling with or need help with, and that you have the solution to their problem that they have been looking for. Visitors want to be reassured that they are in the right place by reviewing your offers and seeing that you have multiple options for them to engage with you at different price points. If you can provide testimonials with or near your offers, you will help communicate the results and benefits they can receive when working with you.

evan, just focusing on your content and your client will come to see you.

My real advice!

Find a business, call them up and tell them what you can do for them. They'll likely shrug you off which is fine, tell them you're going to outrank them on Page 1. Go and do it, maybe rank 1-2 call them back and you'll have them begging for your service. If they still don't want it, call up the businesses in ranks 3-10 and see who's game. Rinse and repeat. Works well with the Youtube video ranking methods out there.

SEO and SEM can be problematic issues for the newbies. But they will be perfect.
At first, I suggest to read moe and more SEO related blogs such as Backlinko, Neil Patel, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, MyTechGoal, and more.
You can be perfect if you have a clear idea about overall SEO. You should be careful that SEO is a slow process.
SEM is one kind of SEO.

You are brand new. You shouldn't be taking clients.

Spend time ranking your own stuff, figuring out how to rank pages, and testing ideas.

Do that for a couple of years. Then you can think about working for clients.

I'm not convinced an article from 2008 is helpful with SEO today....

evanparcon:

There is no substitute for EXPERIENCE. You want people to hire you to optimize and market their websites...best way to get clients is to have DONE that work successfully with your own sites/blogs.

Have you taken sites of your own and made them successful in getting traffic and/or profit using SEO and SEM? How many sites/pages have you ranked on Google first page? Have you applied your knowledge of SEM an doubled or tripled the number of visitors to a site?

Just as a writer needs a portfolio of various writing styles to show prospective clients....you need RESULTS you can point to that demonstrate what YOU can do by applying SEO and SEM to sites/blogs/pages.

If you are new in Digital Marketing, do some research, analyse websites, optimise sites, know the ranking and traffic factor, know about landing page optimisation, CTR, CPC, ADRank lots of stuffs...to know to explore more.... or else hire someone so that you can learn and get business as well....