Welcome To ContentManagementCourse.com
ContentManagementCourse.com‘s mission is to empower you to manage your content effectively .
We do this by providing a completely free online course with comprehensive modules, lessons, and resources designed to help you think about better and smarter ways to organize and manage your content, streamline your content processes, and grow your business faster.
Hello…
I’m Martin Aranovitch and I have thought about the challenges of managing content effectively for a very long time.
It all began when I joined a direct marketing company in 1996 and began making sales presentations and training others to do the same.
This was in the early years of the World Wide Web. The company sold a physical product and had no “web presence” as such. All business was done via word-of-mouth.
In 1998, the company took on an internet-based division. As no one else seemed to understand these new products (basically an online store with your own unique URL filled with affiliate links to different products and services), I created a PowerPoint slide presentation to explain how everything worked.
Soon, other sales representatives in the company began asking me for copies of this slide presentation.
Here’s where I discovered the first challenge of managing content…
As the company’s products and business direction changed and evolved, the content in those presentation slides had to be updated to match the business model. The problem with this is that by now, hundreds of sales representatives were using various different versions of my slide presentation, none of which were official company material.
I had created those slides to assist with my own sales presentations and when other people started using these to grow their own businesses, everything became completely unmanageable. I had no control over the company’s business decisions, or the content in the slides that others were now using, or even which version of those slides they were presenting.
Ironically, in early 2000 (when Yahoo was battling a new company called Google for search engine supremacy and Internet Explorer and Netscape were competing for web browser dominance), the company decided to offload their “web” division, as no one seemed to understand it.
My wife and I bought the rights to it and formed a business training and coaching company to help people start and run their own internet-based businesses.
We also brought in a systems-driven business consultant to help us develop the business. Although the original business that we had purchased the rights to ultimately collapsed, we continued to develop the business training and coaching side and created a completely documented “franchise.”
In 2001, we were approached by a venture capital company with a substantial offer for a controlling share of the business. Although we ultimately declined to accept the offer, this experience was valuable and taught me the importance of having documented systems to run any business effectively.
Armed with this knowledge, I began to meticulously document all the systems and processes I used for every new business I started or worked in.
Building a business with step-by-step documentation and detailed tutorials and checklists that anyone can follow and duplicate, in fact, became an obsession for me.
Fast forward to 2008…
Around 2008, I found myself drawn to a content management and publishing platform called WordPress.
While I originally began building websites with WordPress to develop my own business ideas, I soon found myself building websites for other small businesses in my local area.
The problem is that, once I had built and delivered my clients their website, they had no idea how to use it.
So I began to create training documentation for non-technical users on how to use WordPress.
This is when, once again, I ran into the challenges of managing content effectively.
After investing several years into creating a series of eBook guides on how to use WordPress filled with comprehensive and in-depth step-by-step tutorials, I found keeping the content in these guides up-to-date to be extremely challenging.
WordPress is an ever-changing and evolving platform. It’s also built using open-source software, so thousands of people can contribute to its ongoing development.
Despite the challenges and difficulties, however, I didn’t give up.
Eventually, I transferred the hundreds of tutorials I wrote for the guides online, to a website I’ve built and manage called WPCompendium.org.
While this site is much better organized and the content is easier to update than PDF eBooks, I hadn’t quite developed a system for tracking and managing content updates on this site, so I have to regularly review and update the tutorials on this site.
Now, if you think that keeping content up-to-date on pdf files (e.g. ebooks, reports, etc.) is difficult, imagine how much harder it is to keep content up-to-date on media types like videos, audio content, etc.
Given the above, and the fact that I write all the content on my sites and manage these sites on my own, when I decided to create a video training site (WPMasterclasses.com) to accompany my written tutorials…
… I made the decision not to create the videos myself but to outsource their creation to 3rd-party providers.
The idea behind creating this video training website was to provide users with video content to accompany my written content that I didn’t have to update…my suppliers are responsible for updating the content. I simply replace the outdated videos with the new updated videos when these become available.
Video creation, however, has its own challenges (which I won’t go into here, but cover in the blog).
Once again, I was reminded of the challenges of managing content effectively, especially when dealing with outsourcing content creation. Many of these challenges are addressed in the Outsourcing lesson of this course.
In addition to running WPCompendium.org and WPMasterclasses.com, I also set up and run WPTrainingManual.com, a site dedicated to showing non-technical users how to use their WordPress site effectively.
After rebuilding the site from scratch three times, WPTrainingManual.com is the result of many years of work wrestling with the challenges of managing content effectively – i.e. keeping the content up-to-date, relevant, and accurate.
Why I Built ContentManagementCourse.com
As you can see, I have spent over a decade thinking and wrestling deeply with the challenges of managing content effectively in a business.
I have the unique perspective of being someone who not only runs one, but four content-intensive websites completely on my own, as well as being a full-time blog writer and editor for WPMU DEV, a global technology company with a worldwide distributed workforce, where I am responsible for researching and writing content for the company blog, scheduling content production for a team of content writers, designers, and illustrators, and working with other members across different content teams.
Building and managing several websites on my own and working with a great company and a great content production team that, like most companies, has very limited resources, has taught me a lot about how to be organized and efficient when working with content, whether that be defining a content strategy, or planning, researching, writing, publishing, promoting, and managing content.
This Content Management Course is not meant to be an exhaustive or academic training program but a practical guide to help anyone struggling to manage content on their website and across their business to:
- Understand the challenges of managing content in the Information Age and the Digital Economy,
- Learn how to put in place simple, practical systems and processes that will help you manage your content effectively in an organized and efficient manner.
Whether you are starting your own blog or a website for your small business or working in a large organization, it is my sincere hope and my goal that this course will empower you to learn how to set up effective systems and processes for planning, scheduling, producing, and publishing high-quality content so you can grow your business faster and work smarter, regardless of the business you’re in and how limited your resources are.
In addition to the course lessons, I also share many valuable time-saving tips and trade secrets that I’ve acquired over the years from personal experience in our Free Content Management Email Lessons.
If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consider doing so using the form below:
I hope you will find this course valuable.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions on ways to improve the course content.
Wishing you great success,
Martin Aranovitch
ContentManagementCourse.com