How to free and independently learn content marketing

In the courses all the information is structured. Learning goes from easy to hard. The connection of one lecture with another is shown. The whole subject is covered entirely. Even if the course is superficial, you will have a framework to which you can then add details.

On good courses you are given practical tasks that will help you apply knowledge and better memorize it. The knowledge test will show if you really remember the information or it only seems that way to you. Well, the certificate can be useful when looking for work. Although the latter is a dubious advantage.

In blogs, everything is wrong. Even if the author does provide complete, detailed, and valuable information, he does not have a goal to make you a professional. He just reveals the topic. Blogs usually do not tell how to combine topics into a complete picture: where to start, what to read next, what to finish. The author of the blog does not know your level, and therefore tells either what you already know, or goes deep into the wilds.

Nobody offers or checks practical tasks. But to really determine your level without tests can be problematic.

In short, with courses easier. They all chewed, laid out on the shelves, gave you every kind of help. And blogs are a free steppe.

But you can learn from them. You just have to be a teacher and a student at the same time. And you need to start with the role of the teacher.

We make the curriculum
To learn something, understand exactly what you need to learn. What is important and what is secondary. What you need to learn in the first place, and what can be put off until later. Consider that the curriculum is a framework to which we will then. In this case, we need to find out who the content marketer is and what competencies it should have.

There are three ways to make yourself a curriculum.

1. Write off the table of contents from the textbook.
We find a textbook on the subject, we write off the table of contents. Most often, the table of contents can be found in free access in online stores. You can also go to the offline store and write off the table of contents there.

But for content marketing, no one has bothered to write a decent textbook. Note, not a reference book, but a textbook. So this method disappears.

2. Take a list of articles
Type of such “85 articles for self-study content marketing” or such a “200+ best articles on content marketing in runet.” These are good lists, they will be useful to us. But they do not give us an exhaustive answer to the question of what competencies a content marketer should possess.

The client or employer will not ask how many content marketing articles you have read, he is more interested in what tasks you can perform and how you can help the company.

According to the list, I cannot make a plan for myself: a content marketer should be able to do this and that, now I can only do this, which means I have 80% more to learn. ” You can read two dozen articles from the list, but still do not understand what you are going to and how much is left.

So go to the third method.

3. We take someone’s ready curriculum
Good courses usually lay out their curriculum as a demo version. Here we need them.

In order not to go far, let me take, for example, the curriculum of content marketing courses from Texterra.

It is clear that you can do all these things better, you can do worse, you can add much more useful things, but for starters it will be enough. We have a framework for which we will collect our knowledge.

Looking for training materials
This is where the lists that I talked about in the previous section come in handy. Take from them the articles that fit our curriculum and seem useful to you.

If the articles on some topic are not listed, use the blog search.

If something is not important, you can ask Google. The main thing is to know what to look for.

Not the fact that all the information you find will be useful. Think of each topic as a regular framework on which you can impose new knowledge. If in some article there is not enough information on some aspect, look for this aspect separately. But do not dig into the wilds. The most effective way is to first cover the whole subject, and then add depth to your competencies. Artemy Lebedev wrote about this when he spoke about the progressive jeep method: at any given time.