content marketing course

Seven years ago, I delved full-force, head-first, neck-deep into the industry of content marketing. Throughout my seven-year, full-time career as a self-taught expert, I’ve been hands-on in creating, producing, and training on internal content services that have answered a demand and fulfilled a need for our clients, with the help of an amazing remote team I assembled. To date, my agency (bootstrapped and on zero outside funding) has sold over $4 million worth of content services to over 5,000 clients. I was born with a natural love for both “writing and the internet” – a writer by 12, and an entrepreneur by 16, writing books, creating companies, and learning how to make money online when I wasn’t in school. But at age 19, I found myself in college trying to get a degree I didn’t even want (R.N.). I think I would have made a terrible nurse – the trade just wasn’t for me. So I dropped out, went and followed my heart, and taught myself online writing. I became a top freelancer fast, and within three months had more work than I could handle. Within 5 minutes of that realization, I created an agency at age 20, and Express Writers was born. And now, one of my 2017 goals has just happened. After five months of hard work, and over 400 hours of heart, soul, energy and 5 a.m. mornings, my ultimate industry course is finally here. It’s targeted to the entrepreneur, freelancer, and agency staff member: and within this course, I’ve created an entire curriculum with practical advice on how to build, execute, track and maintain content that works – from A to Z. We’re talking all the way from finding your audience and building a persona for any audience, to planning out your keywords, building an editorial calendar, promoting your content, publishing, analyzing, and auditing – from beginner level, all the way to advanced. I created this course because I believe that with the right strategy and execution knowledge in place, anything is possible through great content marketing. By itself, content marketing has fueled my business the past 6 years. (Here’s a case study I wrote about that late last year. Neil Patel wrote about my agency as an example of a content creation business that does what they say.) We physically live out what we preach – content drives 95-99% of our agency leads and has brought over 5,000 clients right into our doors. Beta launch of our Content Strategy Certification Course is complete! The course launched as a school September 1, 2017. Check it out here. Why There’s a Tremendous Industry Need for a Practical Content Strategist Certification Course In the industry, here’s what I’ve come to realize: 1. Businesses today know they need content marketing more than ever. Back when I was on the phones in 2011, I had to convince people why they needed it. Today, 89% of B2B marketers now invest in content marketing – and we see it. My staff and I have to “convince” on the “why content” question a lot less. 2. But, businesses don’t know what they need in content, or how to make their content marketing work well for them (read: ROI). I think of great content marketing like a well-oiled, rotating water wheel. You have to show up daily and consistently put content out to get something back. If you have your process, people and a source of amazing content ideas down pat, success happens. (For me, content marketing produces 90%+ of my business leads.) But getting there is such a struggle. What do you invest in, how often, where do you put it – and how do you know if it’ll net rankings (or brand awareness/traction – whichever goal you’re going for)? Wait – do you have a goal? All of that is the meat of content strategy. And if you don’t know strategy or have a working one implemented, your content marketing return on investment (ROI) is going to be much, much lower that it could be. The cool part: if you do know it, returns can be HUGE. To date, I’ve created products instead of “knowledge.” But it’s time to delve in, head first. I believe that knowledge is power. Personally, my road to success has been self-carved, and self-created. What I taught myself fuels my expertise. And since the landing page for the course went out in early May, I’ve gone so much more indepth than I said I would with the course content. This insane task is, easily, the best thing I’ve ever done in my industry. I’ve considered renaming my course “Ultimate Content Marketing Certification,” because my students are going to learn everything in the fundamentals of brand content marketing. I’ve even slated top experts to appear on video with me which will go in certain modules of the course to give my students that much more depth on the subject. While building the course, I put in days that started at 5 a.m. and ended only when I crashed in bed at 10 p.m. Easily, you could start a content marketing agency after you take my course. Easily, assemble your own content team. Easily, teach your clients (or your boss’ clients) amazing content techniques that result in trackable ROI. Show them who to target, what to create, what to track, how to measure, how to update = for tangible, working, worthwhile content results. Check out my new course, live at: www.contentstrategycourse.com Exploring the Content Marketing Ecosphere: How Does Content Strategy Fit In as An Integral Part? Here’s a few crazy stats about this industry of content marketing: It’ll be worth $313 billion by 2019. Billions of funding have been put into content marketing startups by now – VC investors realize the value of the industry and SaaS creators/entrepreneurs within it. And 91% of B2B marketers that are “very committed to content marketing” see success (CMI). But… Only 61% of content marketers have a documented content strategy. Yikes! And out of the 89% … Read more