Many marketers hit limits not because they lack ideas, but because they can’t execute or scale them.

Not everyone has the luxury of developers, designers, or analysts who can help turn big ideas into reality. Even if you do, you still need to compete for time and help with the rest of your organisation.

But times have changed. AI tools like ChatGPT make technical learning radically more accessible. It’s now possible to become “technical” even if you’re a humble writer, social media marketer, or brand strategist—because we all have access to a patient, capable technical tutor in the form of a large language model.

I’m a lifelong marketer and non-technical person. I always wanted to learn how to code, but never knew where to start. I bounced off half a dozen coding courses, until I realised that ChatGPT is the perfect teacher and troubleshooter. Now I can call APIs, write simple scripts, and automate parts of my workflow:

If I can do it, you can too.

Ahrefs API guide.

Use the API button in Ahrefs to get a sense for how API requests are structured. If you have access to the Ahrefs API, you can read our documentation and even make free practice requests.

How to get started:

  • Learn the basics of HTTP requests, authentication (like API keys), and response parsing (usually JSON). Try Mozilla’s API guide, Postman Learning Center, or RapidAPI’s beginner tutorials.
  • Try your first live request using Postman to hit a simple endpoint, like fetching weather or headlines. For extra practice, try calling a public endpoint like the News API to fetch the latest articles on any keyword—useful for content ideation or monitoring industry trends.
  • Use ChatGPT to write a Python script using requests, explain each line, and handle API authentication. Paste in API docs—it can help translate them into working code.
content audit process.)

One of many SQL queries I use as part of my blog reporting process. This example selects URLs from our international blogs (/es/ is Spain, and so on).

How to get started:

  • Focus on learning SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY, JOIN, and CASE statements. For an excellent beginner-friendly walkthrough, try Mode’s SQL tutorials or LearnSQL.com’s SQL Basics Track.
  • Use free tools like Mode, DB Fiddle, or BigQuery sandbox to write and test your queries.
  • Paste your table schema (column names and types from your spreadsheet) into ChatGPT and describe what you want to measure—it will write and explain the full query.
Zapier and Make let you build “if-this-then-that” logic across all your marketing tools—without touching code. It’s technically “no-code,” but don’t be fooled—it still teaches you how to think like a programmer: setting conditions, chaining steps, handling exceptions, and reasoning through logic flows.

Here’s a super simple Zap that syncs changes in our master content spreadsheet with spreadsheets for each of our international blogs—in this case, notifying the Japanese marketing team that new articles are ready for localization:

I’ve used Zapier for a hundred different things: managing contact form submissions, triaging leads, triggering editorial workflows for content, syncing data between different spreadsheets, creating notifications in Slack, you name it.

How to get started:

  • Start with Zapier’s template library or Make’s visual scenario builder.
  • Build a simple multi-step automation that uses filters, conditions, and formatting. Zapier’s getting started guide is helpful if you’re new.
  • Ask ChatGPT to map out logic flows or generate JSON webhook payloads for more advanced steps. You can also paste in existing Zap or Make configuration details and ask it to optimize or troubleshoot them.
Apps Script documentation or look through examples on GitHub to see how real projects are built.
  • Build a script that sends email alerts or fetches data from another Sheet. If you’re new to JavaScript, try starting with JavaScript.info, MDN’s JS tutorial, or W3Schools JavaScript basics. These will help you understand the core programming concepts that Apps Script relies on.
  • Use ChatGPT to write, explain, and debug your Apps Script line-by-line.
    • in this guide.

    How to get started:

    • Connect Google Sheets, GA4, or Ahrefs directly to Looker Studio. Follow this guide to get started.
    • Create visualizations like bar charts, pie charts, and time series with calculated fields.
    • Use ChatGPT to help write Looker formulas, blend data sources, or troubleshoot broken charts.
    Books to Scrape demo site, which is designed specifically for practicing web scraping. Try to extract titles, prices, and star ratings, then organize the data into a spreadsheet for analysis. Because the site is built for learning, it’s a safe and responsible place to sharpen your scraping skills.

    Books to Scrape is a site that actively encourages scraping.

    How to get started:

    • Learn Python basics and install libraries like BeautifulSoup and Requests.
    • Practice scraping your own site to avoid breaking anything. You can also test your skills on sites that explicitly allow scraping—like Books to Scrape, a demo e-commerce site built for this purpose.
    • Ask ChatGPT to generate scraper scripts, explain the logic, and handle pagination or user-agent headers.
    top companies” lists, and extracting possible keywords from podcast transcripts.

    A handful of my amateur Python projects.

    How to get started:

    • Learn basic syntax (variables, functions, loops). One great place to start is Replit’s free 100 Days of Python, which combines bite-sized lessons with hands-on coding exercises right in your browser—no setup required.
    • Use os, csv, and re libraries to automate tasks like renaming, cleaning, and categorizing.
    • Ask ChatGPT for Python scripts tailored to your workflow and have it explain the code.
    programmatic SEO strategies, and entire content management systems, capable of tracking briefs, drafts, publish status, and performance.

    Here’s an example content management system we built for our marketing agency, way back in 2017.

    How to get started:

    • Create a base in Airtable or table in Notion with fields like status, owner, due date.
    • Build views to filter by content type, author, or due date.
    • Use ChatGPT to draft formulas, suggest schema improvements, or automate with buttons.
    Site Explorer and Site Audit both accept regex queries:

    How to get started:

    • Try free RegEx testing tools like Regex101 or RegExr, which highlight matches and explain the logic.
    • Start small: match email addresses, isolate URL slugs, or clean campaign tags.
    • Use ChatGPT to write expressions for you—just describe the pattern you want, and it can generate and explain it line-by-line.
    • Learn where Ahrefs accepts regex.
    • For hands-on guides, check out Regular Expressions for Beginners and JC Chouinard’s Regex for SEO.
    search visibility trends, and even build keyword clustering workflows directly in Google Sheets. This weird nested formula is a crucial part of my blog team reporting dashboard:

    This kind of fluency opens up huge leverage, especially when paired with data from tools like Ahrefs. In fact, we wrote a whole post about it: 29 Google Sheets formulas every SEO should know.

    How to get started:

    • Learn how ARRAYFORMULA, QUERY, and FILTER can replace manual copy-pasting with dynamic updates.
    • Use IMPORTRANGE to combine data from different Sheets.
    • Try REGEXMATCH or REGEXREPLACE to clean up messy UTM parameters or flag branded keywords.
    • Ask ChatGPT to help explain formulas, debug errors, or optimize slow Sheets.
    OpenAI’s guide and Simon Willison’s article on prompting offer great frameworks for improving reliability and output quality.

    Final thoughts

    The best marketers aren’t just creative thinkers—they’re technical enough to actually execute, too. And now, with LLMs like ChatGPT, there’s no excuse. You have a 24/7 tutor, debugger, and strategist in your pocket.

    Don’t just ask AI to do things for you. Ask it to teach you. That’s how you build real, durable skills. So pick one of these technical skills, give yourself a weekend project, and use AI to level up.

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