Isaac Rudansky: “To know that just a few hours worth of lectures can really have an impact on somebody’s life is really rewarding.”
Isaac Rudansky is the founder and and CEO of AdVenture Media, a digital advertising agency based in New York. AdVenture have worked with over 500 companies, including multiple publicly traded companies and billion dollar brands. Over 1,000,000 students have received Isaac’s digital advertising training through free tutorials. Isaac spoke to us about how he got into education and why he finds it so rewarding.
I started AdVenture Media in 2013. We help our clients with digital advertising – figuring out how much they should be spending, understanding who their buyers are and what expectations they have for the services and products that our clients offer. Then we execute those advertising campaigns for them. Back in 2014, I made a YouTube video teaching somebody how to launch their first ever Google AdWords campaign from scratch. That video performed really well and it brought in a lot of clients. This then led me to create a full length course that was about 30 hours long teaching Google AdWords in more detail and more depth. It’s been very fulfilling to have that educational aspect of my career being developed. I really enjoy teaching.
I get reached out to a lot by course publishing platforms. I take a look at the platform to see if it seems legitimate or not, and see what their background and history have been. And when Alison reached out to me and I took a look at their platform, I saw that it seemed like a real high quality platform, that they were giving their students a really high quality experience and they were only going after high quality instructors. That’s the type of dynamic I want to be involved with and that’s the type of place I want my courses to be posted. So I worked with the Alison team to get my courses live and since then it’s been going really well.
I think I’m most proud of the Google Ads course simply because it’s impacted the most people’s lives. I get messages all the time from students who tell me that they either changed careers or landed a new job or got a promotion because of the content in the course and what they able to achieve through it. I recently got a message from somebody who told me that they were at the end of their rope. They were at a job where they were really miserable, they weren’t making any money, they were very dissatisfied. They took my course and the content and the clarity of it inspired them to change careers and to take digital advertising more seriously. They got a job at an awesome company and they’re really happy. To know that just a few hours worth of lectures, on a pretty boring topic to most people, could really have an impact on somebody’s life overall, is really rewarding.
Generally, for online courses I would say three things. Firstly, take notes of the key topics that you think are interesting or useful, and then investigate and further your knowledge of those topics with extracurricular content, whether it’s through blogs or other courses. Also, if you took a course and it’s good, watch or do it again. Repetition is how you remember the content so you can actually use it in your daily life. Very often we’ll watch courses and they’re long and advanced and it’s so much information that you can’t really practically implement it because you don’t remember it well enough, so watch it twice. The third thing I would advise is that there’s so much content out there, so much of it is good but also so much of it is bad. Try to figure out from the first 15 to 30 minutes of watching a course whether or not this is going to be high quality because you don’t want to be 12 hours in and realise that you’ve wasted the last 12 hours.
