Learning how to create effective content is the first step toward growing your brand’s awareness and building trust and credibility with your audience. This foundational knowledge is taught in HubSpot Academy’s free Content Marketing Certification course, which over 15,000 people have earned since its launch in November 2016. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to developing a successful content process.

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To help marketers take their efforts to the next level, HubSpot Academy launched today a new bonus class in the Content Marketing Certification Course. The new class is based on learnings from HubSpot Content Professor and digital nomad Justin Champion, who hit the road earlier this year in his Airstream and DIY-ed truck camper to teach a series of content creation workshops at various HubSpot Users Groups across the country.

Through his travels, Champion researched and performed content experiments with multiple HubSpot customers. The end result is an easy-to-understand, step-by-step content strategy framework, one with proven tactics and results on how to effectively compete for attention in today’s noisy digital landscape via topic clusters and pillar pages. The Content Marketing Certification course is available on demand, so marketers can learn and transform at their own pace.

“If you really want to create effective content that converts visitors into leads and eventually customers, you need to create a helpful, positive user experience that solves for both the searcher and the search engine, not just one or the other,” said Champion. “Your content can solve for the human and the machine by linking topic clusters (i.e., content you control, such as blog posts, videos, and social media posts) that cover a specific core topic in depth to a centralized resource hub, known as a content pillar.”

In addition to being offered as a class, the framework is also available through a supplemental Content Marketing Workbook that provides marketers with a step-by-step guide to put this newfound knowledge into practice in their own business.

Etuma, a text analysis company, was one of the first HubSpot customers to go through this framework for creating topic clusters and pillar pages. At the time, Etuma’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Matti Airas, said since implementing this new approach, they’ve “received four times the amount of leads if you measure by quality.”

Champion even put himself through the step-by-step content strategy framework by deconstructing a DIY truck camper guide from his site, Wild We Wander, into an ungated pillar page, resulting in a first page ranking for a competitive keyword and a 329% lift in organic traffic in less than four months. 

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 To learn more about the new course and sign up for a free HubSpot Academy account, please visit certification.hubspot.com/content-marketing-certification-course.

 

Originally published Nov 16, 2017 2:00:00 PM, updated January 19 2023