Practical Content Strategy & Marketing: The Content Strategy & Marketing Course Guidebook

Finally: a real-life, practical industry guide on content strategy and marketing. (Second edition launched July 2021)

Practical Content Strategy & Marketing is your go-to guide on a practical content strategy and marketing education, created by author Julia McCoy as a written accompaniment to her new course, the Content Strategy & Marketing Course (contentstrategycourse.com).

If you run a business, or if you’re trying to break into a top-dollar content marketing career, you need to know the practical concepts involved in content strategy and marketing.

The “how,” the “why,” the “where” of content. Content marketing itself involves so many platforms, formats, content types, strategies, tools—and to get the most ROI from your approach to content marketing and strategy, you have to know how to do the most important content marketing practices. Forget FOMO and trying to figure out too many things. This guide will teach you the most important foundations and skills you actually need in order to get far in our booming industry of content marketing.

For the first time in the industry, Practical Content Strategy & Marketing lays the “hows” of content marketing and strategy out, in a step-by-step approach, book form. Each section has written exercises built to solidify what you’re reading and learning—you’ll be able to fill these out with a pen. Don’t be afraid to mark up this book!

Why is this book different? You’re not going to find corporate, birds-eye, mumbo-jumbo fluff in this content marketing guide. Quite the opposite. The author, Julia McCoy, won her way to the top (awarded as the top 33rd content marketer in 2016) the hard-knocks way. She dropped out of college and built a content agency, Express Writers, on nothing but $75 and the tenacity to go and follow her dream and see it through. Five years later, Julia’s business has served over 5,000 clients and employs over 40 team members, and her content consistently ranks at the top of Google and among the highest-shared for guest publications.

Her go-to marketing strategy? A practical, hands-on content marketing approach that has ended up bringing her 99% of the clients her agency currently works with.

With Julia as your guide, learn the principles and physical “how-to” behind these six key cores of effective content marketing:

• Module 1: Core Foundations of an ROI-Based Content Strategy
• Module 2: Audience Persona Discovery, Sales Funnel Content Mapping, & Style Guidelines
• Module 3: Understanding Keywords, SEO Opportunities, & Creating Keyword Reports
• Module 4: How to Build Content Cores (Your Content House) for an Authority Presence Online
• Module 5: Practical Content Creation (Your Site & Guest Blogging)
• Module 6: Content Promotion, Setting a Budget, Preparing Your Editorial Calendar, & Maintenance

Along the way, you’ll get to build a working content strategy from the ground up, using the Brand Strategy Exercises in each module. Have your pen and thinking cap ready—and a brand you want to build an entire working strategy for!

Practical Content Strategy & Marketing is a field guide for the smartest content marketers who know that strategy is the key to thriving in our world of new marketing through content. Bonus: leading business marketing expert Mark Schaefer joins Julia to write the foreword, and guests Sujan Patel, Michele Linn, Steve Rayson and more appear in guest lessons throughout the book.