Why take my content strategy course?
Short answer: In this course, I’m going to teach you how to create, execute, and maintain – from the ground up – effective brand content.
Taught from a front-end (user, customer, content creation) perspective with a touch of back-end (software, processes) perspective, you’ll learn everything you need to know about content strategy at a beginner to intermediate level, and how to plan and create great content that produces results for any brand.
Why Invest Right Now?
Content Strategy is Exploding as an Industry: By 2019, content marketing will be worth over $300 billion as an industry. Also - in 2017, content marketing is a leading area where companies plan to add new staff! The salary for these positions is predicted to rise by an average of 3.6% just this year alone.
Online content is in huge demand: There’s a major shift happening in marketing from the traditional “cold sell” to helping your customer by providing useful information. And content marketing is just that — a way to proactively help customers with valuable, relevant content.
But the truth is that without a practical, ROI-focused content strategy, content creators won’t be effective in their content marketing.
For most content creators, when it’s time to plan and create insightful content that will yield measurable results, it can be completely overwhelming, If not impossible to know how to do successfully. The questions creep up, and feel impossible to answer: Are you actually creating content worth publishing? How do you measure – and know if you’re getting – results? How can you convince your clients that content is truly worth the investment? How can you be effective and results-oriented with your own content?
Fact: only 9% of B2B companies feel confident about their strategy, a huge decrease from those that are creating content (94% of small businesses).
The problem facing the industry isn’t convincing people that content marketing is important: the problem is coming up with a content strategy that works. It’s time for a go-to, strategy masterplan on the subject that produces viable, working results.
I’m a serial entrepreneur and content marketer, with a love for writing, blogging, and practical content strategy.
Last year, I was named a Top 50 Content Marketer. I’ve built a self-funded, self-started agency (Express Writers) from an investment of no more than $75, which has brought in revenues over $4 million since launch. 90% of our agency clients come in through my inbound content strategy (over 5,000 clients served to date).
I’ve taught content marketing and content creation online for years now, and I believe in a practical approach. I identify with ground-level freelancers: I’ve hustled to become a content marketing expert, and I’ve learned by trial and error (and real client feedback) how to build a content strategy that works. I’ve been my own “advisory board,” “stakeholder,” “content strategist,” and even “writer” all in a day’s work. It’s everyday life when you’re responsible for driving your company’s sales!
Through the years, as my content creation agency has grown and as clients asked us to deliver unique, custom services, I filled roles in my staff and built products. Everything I’ve launched in our content services was based on a client need, and industry demand.
If you’re here, you already know that content marketing, blogging, and online content is a unique field: to be successful in it, you need daily practice to build your expertise, and you need to know how to create and publish successful online brand content to fully comprehend and understand the skillset. With my certification course, you’ll get more than a piece of paper - you’ll learn practical skills that you can immediately put to use in your day-to-day content creation.
I can’t wait to see you in my course!
- Julia
Ever wanted to learn how to build your own brand strategy, from the ground up?
Learn Online Content Strategy in 6 Weeks or Less With this Practical, Easy-to-Digest Course
To be effective at content, you need a strategy. I’ve created this certification course to answer an industry need for a practical approach to planning out content for brands and businesses in any niche.
In this course, I’m going to teach you how to create, execute, and maintain – from the ground up – an effective brand content strategy.
You’ll learn everything you need to know about content strategy at a beginner to intermediate level, and you’ll learn how to plan and create great content that produces results for any brand. I’ve designed this course to be very easy to understand, follow along, create and implement immediately, with many “AHA! I got that!” moments along the way.
To date, I've built a presence worth over $50,000/month in organic, non-paid traffic and rankings, through the high-ROI content tactics I've learned by trial-and-error:
And, I've created some of the top-read, top-shared content on platforms with hundreds of thousands of readers and guest contributors.
Wouldn't it be amazing to look over my shoulder as I create a month of high-ROI content?
Creating content and discovering amazing keywords, after six years of making a living from doing it, is second nature to me. I know what to look for, how to spot them, and even how to spot an immediate "plug" to throw a high quality, potential lead-earning link right there in the rankings - which could be ROI tomorrow while you're waiting on the content you create to rank.
For the first time ever, I'm revealing exactly how I do this. I created several video lessons you'll watch in my course where I plan out a month of content for my agency site - and you get to watch every single step!
Hands-on Student Training During Every Module: Creating a Practice Content Strategy
I’ve always believed that people learn best with hands-on practice, putting into action something you’ve just learned. So, at every stage of the training, you’ll be putting together a real content strategy for a fictitious client, built step-by-step as you go through the modules.
You’ll build the fictitious client strategy through each lesson you learn. By the end of the course, you’ll get to sit back and enjoy the beautiful, working, and cohesive brand content strategy you just built from scratch!
Here's how it all breaks down:
In this training, you’ll learn how to build a core, profitable, content strategy foundation, which is broken up into these phases:
1. Audience Persona (and FAQs): This is the basis of creating content that reaches and impacts your targeted reader (potential client/buyer). You’ll learn how to identify your audience; create a persona around their likes, dislikes, and interests – and find their biggest questions in seconds.
2. Long-Tail, High Value Keywords & Topics: The secrets of great keyword and topic discovery will be completely demystified in this section! Worried that you’ll be overloaded with a list of tools to use? Think again. In my years of content marketing, I’ve learned that less of the “right” tools can be far more – your time is saved, and you only need a few real features in a tool to get to the meat of keywords and topics.
I’ll show you, step-by-step, how to use less tools and get more results – saving you time and helping you invest in the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to SEO and content discovery tools.
Using the best tools on the market, you’ll learn how to discover amazing keywords.
You’ll also learn how to validate topics and immediately discover trends using a leading content discovery and analysis tool.
3. Defined Content Types & Costs: You’ll learn what content types are truly worth the investment for different brands and industries, and what costs to expect along the way.
4. Editorial Calendar:This ugly content term that usually translates to “a lot of unnecessary work” will be completely redefined with what I’ll teach you in this section. Seriously! Using a low-cost, super simple tool, you’ll be able to put together everything you just learned in the previous sections and build an editorial calendar in minutes that any client will be able to understand at a glance. You’ll learn how to measure for and write down an attainable goal for every single piece of content you put down on the calendar, enabling you (or your client) to track ROI from each post.
5. Content Publishing & Promotion Schedule: When do you publish, where do you publish, and how the heck do you promote it? I’ll address, at entry-level, all of these questions and teach you a success launchpad that you can apply to any brand, in any industry – with case studies of what works, and what doesn’t.
6. Content Maintenance, Updating & Tracking: Content can’t be created to “set and forget,” no matter how evergreen it is. Instead, it’s an investment that pays off over time – and for best results, you need to know how to track, update, and maintain your content so the clicks you get on your content translate to solid ROI as time increases.
You’ll learn one of the easiest methods I use daily to track position changes, and you’ll be able to immediately see the posts that begin to rank (or report to your clients on their rankings) – plus, download and save a handy-dandy checklist of what to start updating and maintaining to maximize your CTRs when your content starts climbing in the rankings.
7. Bonus Sections At the VIP level, you'll get access to my exclusive video interviews with experts, bonus cheat sheets, blueprints, and easy-to-follow checklists. You'll also get a video demo of how I successfully approached and was published on a leading guest platform within 48 hours of approaching the editor (step-by-step revealed - for the first time)! You'll even get access to the files I personally use to sell my clients. This is a huge value add for any freelancer / agency staff member. I have more bonuses lined up that I’ll reveal at launch, which will add a lot of value to the results you’re able to take away as a Certified Content Strategist!
As you create a content strategy and go through the sections in this course, you’ll learn:
Want cheat sheets, templates, PDFs and more that you can download and take straight to your client to inspire them to invest in content?
I've designed ready-to-go templates and swipe files that you can copy and paste and take straight into your content creation and client meetings.
From an email to get guaranteed survey replies to help you build a sales-funnel aware content audience persona, to a PDF you can download and take straight to your client who isn't sure about his or her investment in content creation...
The cheat-sheet style resources you get included in this course are absolutely worth the investment. Many of them come straight from the content templates I built to convince, convert and support my own agency clients - which my sales team still uses to this very day!
Would you agree that accountability is important?
Especially with a massive end goal of creating your own test Brand Content Strategy from the ground up! It's necessary to feel a level of accountability and talk to other students going through the same lessons and exercises that you're in the middle of. That's why we've set up an exclusive FB group just for you and your fellow students to access from Day 1 of class start day! Get peer review, help from our teachers (Julia & team), and achieve better success along the way.
Guest Course Contributors
I’m honored to have industry experts join me to film guest lessons for the Practical Content Strategist Certification Course! As you take the course, you’ll be able to also go through tangible, real-time exercises in the student workbook, based on the lessons they’ve created.
Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Web Profits, Digital Marketer
VP of Content, Content Marketing Institute
Content Director, Unbounce
Co-Founder, BuzzSumo
Customer Success Lead, SEMrush
How do I know if this course is for me?
>> Who This Course is NOT For
This course is not for the marketer looking for an “overnight” solution, a “quick fix” to their content, or an easy, cheap SEO "hack." It’s also not for someone who needs a corporate approach to strategy (theory only, no practical application, and/or advice on how to take their content to an advisory board and stakeholders).
>> Who This Course IS For
When I started out in content marketing, it was from the ground up. I was hustling to get every client, learning what it takes to succeed – and I know what it’s like to come from that place. Clients expect you to produce high ROI content, or know how to, and when you can’t, you’re kicked to the curb. With me as your teacher, you’re not going to be taught from a corporate birds-eye level, but rather from a ground-level perspective that will impact your effectiveness with content, and help grow your bottom line. I’m going to share tactical advice you can take home and start working today into your client’s (and your own) brand content strategy.
This is an advanced, hands-on, practical course for the:
By the end of this course, you’ll no longer:
Instead, you’ll have a wealth of content ideas to pull from whenever you need them: you’ll be able to construct a high-value, easy-to-understand editorial calendar for any brand in minutes, track and prove the ROI of your content, and even know how to advise your clients on audience-relevant, high ROI topics and keywords with your newfound skills.
"Prior to training with Julia, I had the same problem a lot of writers and marketers do: where to begin with a client.
Which topics will resonate most with their audience? What formats do they prefer? What makes for good keywords that will actually convert?
In short, how can I deliver content that will make my client happy so they hire me again and again?
I can tell you with certainty that the Content Strategist Course will answer these questions and give you a detailed roadmap for working with all kinds of different clients. I’ve been through the cores of this training, which Julia built internally for her staff early on in her agency – and it turned into direct ROI for me.
The roadmap you get here is a huge advantage. Julia gives you a template that’s flexible enough to work for any client, yet still produces impressive results across different industries. There are no vague instructions or loose guidelines to decipher. She shows you exactly what to do.
Of course, it also helped having Julia there to provide feedback along the way. I was never left to judge if I had done something correctly based on the instructions.
As the Content Strategist for Express Writers, I’ve already used the core principles of this program to increase my profits. I’m very excited to get a chance to learn even more from Julia’s with this new, expanded version of our internal staff training – and I can absolutely recommend it as critical education for any freelancer, entrepreneur, or agency staff member to increase their content skills and their direct paycheck."