Skillshare Teacher Spotlight: Maggie Stara

“It’s amazing how a cheesy Facebook ad of a girl with a laptop on a beach, drinking a margarita, can completely change your life,” says Skillshare’s Top Teacher Maggie Stara.

Maggie is a creative marketer and the mastermind behind one of our most popular classes, Social Media Content Creation in Canva: From Beginner to Advanced. Since its launch in 2020, it’s helped over 37,000 students and counting. 

The class’s sustained popularity is a direct reflection of Maggie’s expertise in Canva, the depth and breadth of her experience in digital marketing, and her dynamic and engaging teaching style. 

To celebrate the release of a new and improved version of the class, we caught up with Maggie to talk about her journey. Her story is inspiring, and her insights are invaluable to anyone curious about digital marketing, content creation and entrepreneurship. 

That Facebook ad she saw back in 2016 first sparked her interest in digital marketing and led her to take an online course. Since then, she has successfully turned this interest into a multifaceted and fulfilling creative career. Her infectious energy and genuine passion for what she does shine through in every aspect of her work—her classes, YouTube videos, social media content, blog posts and one-on-one mentorship sessions. 

Thinking back to that image of working on a beach, Maggie admits: “In my nine years of working online, I’ve never once managed to recreate that Facebook ad fantasy. But there’s still time!”

Working in a creative field and educating others is so perfectly aligned with who Maggie is as a person, you’d think she meticulously planned every step of her journey here. But that’s the thing about perfect career paths—they’re very rarely planned. 

Steve Jobs once said “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward.”

Looking forward, Maggie’s journey might have looked like a winding path. But in hindsight, it’s clear she’s always been pulled to nurture her creativity and passion for teaching. 

The signs were there from the start. “I was always the kid with paint in her hair, wearing mismatched shoes just for fun,” says Maggie. 

Teaching others came naturally to her, too. She taught the oboe in high school, then sexual health at her university. She spent a summer in Italy teaching English, before eventually traveling all across Europe as a tour guide.

In 2016, Maggie stumbled upon an online course and discovered the possibility of working in social media. As an avid traveler, she loved the idea of being a “digital nomad” and making a living from anywhere in the world. The course itself left a lot to be desired, but it was enough to pique her curiosity on the topic. 

From there, she took other courses, watched YouTube tutorials and learned everything she could about digital marketing and social media. 

One thing became clear: the course Maggie would have loved to take—something high-quality,  knowledge-packed and beginner-friendly—unfortunately didn’t exist. So, she set out to one day fill that gap and create her own. 

Over the next few years, she continued to deepen her knowledge and expand her skill set through freelancing, working at an agency and working in an in-house digital marketing role. At the same time, the dream of teaching her own courses kept percolating. She made attempts and learned a great deal—much more than she would have if she had found immediate success. 

It wasn’t until February 2020 that Maggie made the decision to quit her job and go all in on teaching digital marketing. “It may have been the worst possible time to make this transition,” she recalls, “but it also meant that I had to be 100% in because failure was not an option.” The early days were overwhelming, but Maggie stayed the course by focusing on the process, rather than the outcome. “I knew if I just broke down my tasks by weeks and days—instead of trying to panic about what would happen in a year or five years—eventually, I would get to where I needed to go.”

And get there she did. Five years later, Maggie is a best-selling instructor, and her classes have been taken by over 150,000 students. She has also become a wife and a mother. She feels incredibly fortunate to have a job that gives her fulfillment, a sense of purpose, and freedom to travel and spend time with her family. 

“I get to hear from people of all ages and feel like I’m a small part of each of their journeys to a more creative, fulfilling life,” says Maggie, “and I can’t think of a bigger honor than that.”

“Anyone who owns a smartphone has some level of digital marketing skill already,” encourages Maggie. We all consume social media, come across ads, search Google and read emails. We also intuitively react to what we see—some of it resonates, and some of it doesn’t—which means that on some level, we understand what makes a piece of content effective. 

Whether you’re a content creator, small business owner, or you want to start offering a digital marketing service to others, “the learning curve is not nearly as steep as it is in most other careers.” You just have to shift your mindset from “being a consumer to being a producer of content.”

Maggie’s Powerful Social Media Marketing: From Beginner to Advanced class is a great place to start. It focuses primarily on social media, but it will also introduce you to other aspects of digital marketing—search engine optimization, paid ads, email marketing and more—and help you decide whether you’re interested in diving deeper. 

It’s also worth noting that the rise of AI tools has lowered the barrier to entry into digital marketing even further. “We can now use AI to help us build strategies, analyze existing content and even create assets,” says Maggie. When she first started running paid ads on social media, for example, “one wrong move could collapse your whole campaign.” Now, thanks to Meta’s AI features, the entire process is “much more intuitive and supportive”. 

Maggie predicts that “the shift towards AI will continue”, but in order to be successful at digital marketing, you’ll need to really understand how to use these tools to your advantage. “What we’re seeing now is a lot of mediocre marketing content from people who are copying and pasting ChatGPT results, instead of learning to work together with their AI tools to create exceptional content.”

Lastly, Maggie believes “there will be a much bigger shift towards ‘real’ video content.” She says, “as AI content dominates the space, people will crave real human interaction more than ever, so if you can learn to get comfortable in front of the camera, that’s going to be a huge power move going forward.” 

Canva is at the top of Maggie’s list, of course. She says, “It’s a powerhouse for creating graphics, animations, videos, interactive websites, quizzes and so much more.” Her current favorite feature is the ‘Match & Move’ transition, which can be used to effortlessly create complex animations. 

Maggie also uses:

Re-filming classes is a challenging process that takes months and months of planning, but it’s one of Maggie’s favorite aspects of her job. “It’s just been so cool to see the evolution of some of my classes over the years,” she says, “and to see my existing students re-learning the material with me each time I release a new version.”

Social Media Content Creation in Canva: From Beginner to Advanced is now in its sixth edition, and the difference from where it started, according to Maggie, is “night and day”. 

“I first created this class as a way to answer frequently asked Canva questions I kept getting from my clients,” she says. “Now, it’s the ultimate step-by-step guide that takes someone from never having designed anything online to being an absolute pro at all things content creation.”

The new version is jam-packed with hands-on exercises so that students can learn by doing rather than just watching. Maggie has also made sure that “every single lesson incorporates at least one new skill they haven’t learned before.” 

“You will have learned (and put into action) pretty much everything I’ve learned about Canva in eight years, but in a matter of just hours,” says Maggie. “I have no doubt that anyone can walk away from this class feeling not just confident, but excited about where their newfound Canva skills can take them!”Whether you’re brand new to this class or you’ve taken it before, be sure to check out the new and improved version. And don’t forget to explore Maggie’s other classes and follow her Skillshare profile to stay in-the-know on all things digital marketing.