What’s the No. 1 core responsibility of content managers? (Or the digital marketing managers tasked with owning the content marketing for a company?) Well, if you remember last week’s episode of Liz’s One-Woman Content Manager Resources Party, the answer is simple:
Developing and executing a revenue-generating content strategy.
There are a lot of other related tasks and soft skills content managers and strategists need to master in order to be effective — for instance, being a fantastic interviewer of subject matter experts — but if you can’t do that one thing, nothing else matters.
Creating a content strategy is complicated
As I shared a few weeks ago, creating a content strategy was one of my biggest pain points when I first started out as a content manager, as I struggled to:
- Understand which broad content topic areas we should be covering, as a means to drive revenue.
- Balance competing priorities from different organizational leaders, each of whom believed their priorities were the most important.
- Guaranteeing our content strategy was optimized around the right keyword opportunities.
Here’s the thing, though. After spending years combing the internet for some sort of scalable, repeatable playbook for creating a content strategy, I couldn’t find one that really fit the bill.
So, I decided to create my own online course that will teach you how to do create a content strategy in the digital age, taking into account the massive changes in search, buying behavior, and so on.
This course is now available 100% for FREE in IMPACT+, but I wanted to give you a little taste of what you’ll find in the course…
What does my content strategy course cover?
Here is the introduction video to the course, to get you started:
Looks amazing, right? Well, if you want to gain access to the rest of the sessions, create a free IMPACT+ account.
What other lessons are included in this course?
- What are topic clusters and content pillars?
- How to build a topic cluster
- How to build a content pillar
- How to create the perfect content calendar
By the end of this course, you will…
- Understand why the old way of building a content strategy with scattershot keyword research and endless spreadsheets no longer works.
- Why you need to embrace the topic cluster and content pillar organizational architecture model for your strategy, as a means to boost your search rankings, improve your site organization, and increase search engine visibility.
- How to build topic clusters and content pillars that are directly tied to your business goals and your revenue targets.
- How to seamlessly integrate individual and seemingly competing priorities into your content strategy.
- How to create an editorial content calendar (template included) that will empower you to document, execute, and track the progress of your content strategy.
- Know how and when you should include your leadership team in your content strategy conversations.
I would highly recommend you take Marcus Sheridan’s course on the fundamentals of They Ask, You Answer prior to taking this course, but it is not required.
If you do not take this course in advance, read these two articles:
Now, go forth, create your free IMPACT+ account, and go build the content strategy of your dreams!