This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Writing is the easy part of content marketing. It is also the only part you can hand to somebody else.

The hard part is upstream and downstream, and nobody teaches either

Upstream, everything worth publishing lives in the heads of people who will never write it down. Your best engineer, your head of sales, the founder — they know the material, and asking them for a blog post produces silence for three weeks and then two paragraphs. Downstream, six months later somebody asks what forty published pieces actually did, and the answer arrives as a screenshot of traffic. Between those two failures sits a calendar that gets filled because it is a calendar, not because anyone decided what belongs in it.

What this course covers

Forty-two lessons following the content supply chain from the source to the number at the end. Strategy first: who owns content, the six layers of a brand and which layer each asset belongs to, a same-day brand audit including how AI assistants currently describe you, positioning turned into six reusable messages, tone of voice taught to a model, campaign anatomy from big idea to channel mix, and a dashboard that separates awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty. Then the audience, researched rather than imagined: study types, question design, scales and length, whether open questions repay the analysis, fielding a questionnaire like a small campaign, the report a decision-maker will read, and the move from findings to a plan. Then the source of material: explicit against tacit knowledge, extraction through interviews and working groups, structuring into a base or a wiki, communities of practice, retrospectives, and measuring whether anyone uses what was captured. Then production: how adults take in information, the platform stack, programme and material design, running a live session, holding attention to the end, and evaluating the result. Then the mechanics that make people finish: low-budget gamification with no platform, recognition as a format, behaviour shaped rather than announced, certificates and completion. Then distribution: the site as a content hub, referral as an organic channel, email, search, video and copy, paid placement and remarketing, each social platform on its own terms, and a monthly report. Finally earned media and the accounting: narratives tied to business goals, the editorial calendar, in-house against agency, founder thought leadership and its limits, what happens when content becomes a reputational problem, and output, outcome and impact instead of reach.

Five blocks were recorded for an internal audience

I would rather say this plainly than have you find it in lesson three. The channel block was recorded around employer marketing, the research block around employee studies, the knowledge block around corporate expertise, the production block around internal learning, and the gamification block around employees. The craft in each transfers exactly — a scale is a scale, a questionnaire is a questionnaire, and a video that holds attention holds it regardless of who commissioned it — but the examples are drawn from inside companies rather than from consumer brands. The knowledge block is the reason this course exists at all: no standard content marketing curriculum teaches you how to get material out of an expert who will not write, and that is the constraint most content teams actually run into.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 42 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the messaging matrix, the brand audit scorecard, the questionnaire design guide, the knowledge capture methods, the campaign brief, the channel mix, the content dashboard and the output-outcome-impact model

• The upstream half of content marketing, which most courses skip entirely

Where to start

Pick the expert in your organisation whose knowledge would make the best article, and write down why it has not been published yet. That sentence is the problem this course solves first. Enrol now and start today.