Learn Content Marketing

1. Create Something of Value

Let's do our first project together! We're going to create something of value — and test it. This is known as an incentive.

2. Great Branding Examples & Idea Inspiration

If you're stuck or you need more inspiration, let's look at some companies that are doing content marketing really well.

3. Test it Before You Make it

Here's where it gets really interesting: instead of making the thing that you're going to make, we're going to test it.

4. Let's Review: How Quick Was That?

Impressive! It's only a couple of minutes into the class, and you're already rocking and rolling. This is huge. Content Marketing is about having a conversation, and we need to get feedback right away on our ideas, in real time.

5. Core Questions: What and Why?

Before we go any further, let's stop and ask about your what and your why: Why do you want attention? What exactly is it that you want? The more specific you can be, the better.

6. Download These Notes. Take This Quiz

What do you remember? What did you learn? Download this worksheet and quiz yourself — and remember the highlights.

1. How to Set Up Your Email List (for Beginners)

If you're brand-new to email list building, email marketing, and content marketing, we'll get you all set up. In this section, we'll look at easy ways to begin building your list — using Tiny Letter or Mailchimp, and how to set that up. If you're a pro email user already and know InfusionSoft, Constant Contact, AWeber, or another email marketing tool, then head on to Project 2!

1. Who Are Your Right People?

Who is your audience, your reader, your user? It's time to get to know everything about them. Do you know who your right people are? Let's give them a face and a name, and start to tell their stories.

2. User Profile Case Studies

User profiles can be hard to understand, so let's look at a couple of case studies to get a better grasp on what this means. In these examples, we'll look at creating a blog on minimalism, and how we created profile avatars for one of our One Month classes, Programming for Non-Programmers.

3. Your Turn! Creating Customer Profiles

Now it's your turn! Get out your notebooks and start to sketch the beginning avatars and cartoons of what your target audience looks like. It's okay if it's just a sketch at first — we'll talk about how to build out your profiles with specific questions, research tools, and iterative learning.

4. Would You Rather Be Loved, Hated, or Neither?

Pop quiz: would you rather be loved, hated, or have people feel indifferently towards you and your brand?

5. Research Methods for Learning About Your Audience

Here are some specific tools and methods you can use to get to know your target audience better. Each of these strategies also lends itself towards content creation as well.

6. Looking Back to Your First Email: What Were the Responses?

You sent an email around to a few friends and colleagues asking for their input on your incentive. What did they have to say about your cookie? What were the responses?

1. All the Content Types! (Tip: Make it Easy and Useful)

With all the content types out there — from videos to images to graphics to blog posts — how do you know where to begin? What content type should you focus on, and where should you start? This graph will help you map it out quickly and easily.

2. Little Bets to Big Wins

What does Chris Rock do that makes him a standout comedian? How do you guarantee that your bag of tricks becomes a series of hits? Peter Sims (author of Little Bets) and Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) have a lot to tell us about making a plan — and when you're over-planning.

3. The Business of Content: Four Key Questions from Seth Godin

When you're making your business, ask yourself these key questions before you begin.

4. Your Content Strategy Plan: 10 Questions

Get out your pens and paper! I've got a fill-it-in-calendar, a series of planning questions, and a step-by-step guided way to get your plan ready to go. You ready? GREAT.

5. Examples of Effective Content Strategy in Action

When in doubt, learn from the best. Here are 10 examples of companies that nail it in their content strategy plans — and executions.

6. How Will You Know if it Worked?

How will you know whether or not what you're doing is working? Some things are really easy to measure, while other things aren't — what will you use to evaluate your success?

1. The Best Way to Grow Your Audience...

In this section, we'll look at the art of talking about yourself — and getting other people to talk about you.

2. Here, There, and Everywhere

How do people find you? One of the most important things for your online home is understanding links.

3. Write 4 Pitches: Your Project 4 Assignment

Your 4th assignment will be writing four short pitches to share your work to the world. I'll break down the world of publishing, PR, and pitching journalists so that you can write amazing pitches.

4. Pitching, Publishing, and Guest Blogging

Where I talk about all the things I've learned working in publishing, pitching journalists, and understanding how to publish your content around the web.

5. PR: Getting People to Talk About you

Getting press is one of the trickiest things you can do. It's harder than publishing on your own website, because you don't know what journalists' responses are going to be.

6. Write a Pitch Before You Write the Story

Want to get on the good side of a journalist? Want people to want to talk about you? Here are my best strategies for emailing press and getting them interested in your stories.

7. The Art of Asking

This article was originally published on Medium.com. It's since been viewed 37,000 times and retweeted thousands of times. It hit a nerve — so I'm including it as part of this course. 

8. 20 Free Ideas on Promoting Yourself, Your Project, or Your Business

Try out any of these strategies (or several of them) and see how they boost your connection, promotion, and business marketing.

9. Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

The value of your content depends on its shelf life. Why you should be focusing on evergreen content, and how to use syndication to distribute your work more broadly.

1. Key Strategies for Actually Making the Content

Let's look at making the thing that you want to make — we're going to talk about writing, strategy, and doing your project.

2. A Few Important Writing Tips

What does snot-blowing have to do with writing? Everything. Lets talk about morning pages, writing habits, and other tricks I've learned from years as a writer.

3. Bonus Reading List on Copywriting, Storytelling, and Marketing

How do you teach yourself about storytelling? Why is it that some copywriters seem to nail it, while others flounder? Here's a top 25 list on books on storytelling, marketing, and copywriting.

4. Essay: Ten Ways to Be a Better Writer

"Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated." — Paul Graham

5. Writing Templates You Can Steal

Here are ten ways to structure your writing — with tried-and-true templates, so you don't have to re-create the wheel. Let's break down writing into something easier to do, so that you can get writing right away!

6. Project 5 Downloads: Pomodoro Timers, Making, and Writing

The whole point of this section is to make the thing you're working on: take some time — I'll tell you how much time! — to make your incentive

1. Why Positioning is Imperative for Every Brand

What does it mean to "position" your brand or your company? Why does it matter? In the busy mind of the consumer, your impression means a lot.

2. How to Write Great Headlines That Get Results

The secret to writing great headlines that attract customers, build audiences, and grow your business.

3. Ten Ways to Use Storytelling to Go Further

Humans are born storytellers. The way we tell and share our stories about who we are, what we do, and what we want. This, in turn, affects who sees us, hears about us, and whether or not the right people connect with us.

4. The Secret Sauce: Creating Viral Content?

What does it take for your content to go viral? The equal-odds rule suggests one thing is very clear, and in Contagious, Jonah Bergen talks about what makes content more likely to go viral.

5. SEO: Getting Your Keywords in Order

What is SEO and why does it matter? SEO is the process of getting traffic from all over the web and sorting it into the world's library, the search machines.

6. A/B Testing Basics

Are you testing your titles, images, headlines, and copy? If not, you're missing out.

7. Setting up a Landing Page

Why are landing pages so important, and why should you make one before anything else?

8. Your Choice: Headlines or Keywords?

None of this matters if you don't put it to work. Download this quick cheat-sheet of headline templates and make your headlines sing by writing them out with each of these recipes. Bonus: pick your keywords with a little research.

1. Have a Conversation — Don't "Email" People

Communication is about conversation and connection — not shouting at people. Here's how to translate that into your email communications.

2. Types of Email Communications

There are dozens of different ways to use email — newsletters, snippets, digests, images, text-only — so how do you pick one? Lets look at the options.

3. The Long-Form Sales Letter

Designers hate them. Data loves them. How does the long-form sales letter work, and why does it work so well?

4. Email Automation and Drip Campaigns

Email automation lets you talk to people when you're sleeping, and drip campaigns help you educate, inform, and sell to your audience over a given period of time. A look at what we do at One Month.

5. Project 7: Setting Up Your Email(s)

It's time to set up your first email automation sequence, if you don't already have one!

6. Bonus: 9 Mistakes You Might Be Making in Your Emails

1. Landing Pages, SEO, Email Capture, and Conversion Rates with Doug Logue, Resident Growth Hacker at One Month

In this session, we talk with resident Growth Hacker Doug Logue, responsible for the growth of One Month. We talk about creating landing pages, embedding sign-up forms, what conversion rates are, and why SEO is important. Consider this a sneak peak into the Growth Hacking class!

1. Generating Attention: Remembering Why We're Here

Why are we doing all this work in the first place? Content marketing is all about generating attention for you and your business.

2. Building Relationships and Meeting New People

How do you meet new people? How do you build relationships? And why is content creation sometimes better than in-person meetings?

3. Interpersonal Marketing Tools

Here are a few additional marketing tools you can use to continue to generate leads and build your audience.

4. Growing an Audience

5. Project 8: Investing in Your Loose Ties

They say the best way to learn is to teach: your final project for this class will be to become a content marketing teacher — share this work with someone else, and tell them what you did.

1. Congratulations! You're a Content Marketing Rockstar!

Let's take a hyper-speed look at the 8 things that you did in this class: a quick recap of how awesome you are.

2. What Worked, and What Didn't?

At the end of every experiment, it's critical to stop and reflect. Growth comes from reflection. Two simple questions: what worked, and what didn't?

3. Thank You!

You're all absolutely amazing! Thank you for being a part of this course, for being a rockstar, and for getting this far. You ROCK. 

4. Get Your Certificate!

1. Nathalie Lussier, Media Creator, App Developer, Business Owner

Nathalie Lussier is an award-winning entrepreneur. She graduated with a degree in Software Engineering and a job offer from Wall Street. In a gutsy move, she turned down this job to start her own business right out of college. She's an expert in email marketing, list-building, and affiliate marketing — and she built her own tech tools to help others do the same.

2. Quiet Power Strategy with Tara Gentile

Tara Gentile is a business strategist & coach for creatives, idea people, and professionals who want to leverage their quiet power and devise a strategy for growth without the heartache or hassle. We talk about how to launch your product as a story — and how to do it in a way that fits your personality.

3. Great Marketing Strategies with Tim Leberecht

What does marketing have to do with conversations, strangers, or weirdness? Everything, according to Tim Leberecht, best-selling author of "The Business Romantic," and chief marketing officer for NBBJ, a global architecture and design firm.