CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree — Week 6 Review
By: Sean Wallace
Tags: Growth, Cxl Minidegree, Marketing, Cxl Institute, Growth Hacking

Hey guys and Merry Christmas!

This week I’m halfway — or rather, should be — through CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree. Truth is, I’m starting to get a little worried about my progress.

I’m about 41% done with the material according to my roadmap, and that’s a problem. As per the terms of my scholarship, I have a strict twelve weeks in which to complete all of the courses and pass the final test.

Crisis time? Perhaps. But I have a plan.

So far, I’ve spectacularly failed to apply any of the approaches I’ve learned during my studies, such as — duh — measuring my performance.

So I’m now committing to a new goal: to complete 15% of the course materials per week, for the next four weeks, by Friday of each week.

My thinking goes more or less like this: I’d like to be ready to complete the final exam in week 11. That leaves me time to take the exam PLUS any reattempts I require. For that, I want at least the whole of week 12.

My thinking goes more or less like this: I’d like to complete the final exam in week 11. That leaves me week 12 if I need reattempts and to review old materiaI for my week 12 post which will be a retrospective of the whole course. To make that possible, I absolutely must meet my target of 15%/week. I’ve run out of wiggle room.

More on me and my progress later; for now, I’ll launch into my review of this week’s materials starting with Dan Shure’s SEO Driven Editorial Calendar.

SEO Driven Editorial Calendar

Like Ronseal’s classic 1995 ad, this course does exactly what it says on the tin. This is definitively NOT a general course in SEO; it’s very focused around devising an editorial calendar or content schedule for SEO.

I enjoyed this one. But even though I’m especially interested in SEO, it didn’t grab my attention like some of the others. Maybe it’s because I’m already pretty well-versed in this stuff, but I got the feeling that I could be learning this elsewhere in a lot less time.

Shure says he’s been doing SEO for 10 years. He comments that he sees people building links, worrying about duplicate content penalties, content length, keyword density; in short, he says that none of that really matters.

If I understand right, he’s saying that creating quality content which addresses the questions your customers want answered is the most important thing about SEO.

If so, he’s more or less right. But it’s clearly not the only thing worth paying attention to.

It’s true; entry-level ideas that people have about SEO are basic at best and plain stupid at worst.

Countless people are out there paying an Upwork-tier SEO guy to do some basic keyword research and basing their entire campaign on that. No on-page, no technical, and then they pay someone $0.05/word to write “SEO-optimized” content.

Anyone who has ANY idea about SEO knows how this story ends, and it’s a disaster. Shure’s course will help with that specific problem. But if you want to know how to do SEO on the whole, I’d recommend going a lot deeper.

In particular, I find his dismissal of backlinks to be bizarre. The simple fact is, links still matter in SEO. It’s a shame, but building backlinks from authoritative sites is still demonstrably effective so writing it off as something to ignore seems very strange.

Overall, Shure’s strategy for creating an SEO-driven editorial calendar seems solid. But don’t expect to run an SEO campaign with nothing more than this info: you’ll need to do a lot more learning.

Facebook ads

Wow, this one was a roller coaster ride. At first, I wasn’t super into Curt Maly’s Facebook Ads course. I guess it came off a little bit… salesy? Maybe that sounds weird given that I’m studying marketing? But around halfway through, something really clicked.

I was honestly pretty uninformed about the sheer power of Facebook’s ad platform, and Maly’s course helped me to see it.

Again, this one won’t teach you everything about Facebook ads. Instead, this course focuses on one specific approach to creating a Facebook ad funnel, including several specific techniques with a particular focus on video.

A lot of small businesses I’ve worked with felt like it was somehow inherently better value to build website content and push it via organic traffic. I guess that particular approach to content marketing is easy for beginners to wrap their head around?

I can’t speak to the efficacy of Maly’s approach in contrast. But by the end of the course, his sheer enthusiasm and confidence won me over. I realised that many clients I’ve had over the years would have been a LOT better served by incorporating Facebook ads into their strategy.

This stuff is really powerful, and this is a topic I’ll be studying in greater depth.

My thoughts: week 6

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a challenging course. Not so much in terms of content difficult: anyone halfway intelligent would be capable of completing the modules. But the challenge for me is completing all of these modules inside the 12 weeks prescribed by my CXL scholarship. If you’re working on this alongside a full time job, you’ll need to carve out a BIG chunk of your free time to do it.

CXL estimates that the course will take 111 hours, but to me that feels like an underestimate. Unless you have a drastically better memory than me, you’ll have to dedicate a bunch of additional time to:

Making notes

Working through the provided additional materials

Completing assignments set in the various modules

If you want to study this course very thoroughly, I think it’s reasonable to add 50% onto CXL’s estimate, i.e., expect the course to take somewhere north of 150 hours.

Like I said in the intro, I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do. Nonetheless, I think I can do it now I’ve committed to a specific performance measure.

On top of that, I’ve started viewing the videos at 175% speed. At first, I could only handle 125%, but one thing I can say for sure about the past six weeks is that I’ve learned to absorb information faster.

Next week, I’ll be putting that to the test with my ambitious new study commitment. Until then, Happy New Year!