I transformed a struggling online course marketplace into a growth machine by building their first marketing department and executing a world-class content strategy that increased organic traffic by 389%, boosted domain authority from 26 to 72, and created evergreen content still driving qualified leads years later. Through strategic content creation, targeted distribution, and a creative backlink campaign, I repositioned GoSkills from a one-time course seller to a subscription-based platform with high-quality, repeat customers.

When my former boss referred me to an independent professional course marketplace that was looking for its first head of marketing, I was excited. I love building marketing departments from scratch and taking companies to the next level. 

GoSkills sold an array of professional development courses that taught students how to use work apps, like Excel, Microsoft Office, Evernote and Trello as well as design software, like  Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. They also sold skill-based courses on subjects, like project management, Lean Six Sigma, development, soft skills and leadership.  

Its Excel courses were the most popular by far though. In fact, they put GoSkills on the map. They were the bulk of the site’s revenue thanks to ranking high in SERPs for Excel course-related keywords as well as having partnerships with deal sites, like Groupon, AppSumo and StackSocial. 

While these acquisition channels helped GoSkills become profitable, it was only in the short-term, because they were one-and-done customers. 

The students, who purchased through deal sites, churned almost immediately; rarely even starting the course they’d purchased, and the others, who found them through organic search, would typically complete the course, but only because they needed to show their boss their “certification” of completion. 

This was especially problematic because GoSkills wanted to pivot from selling courses for a one-time fee to selling a course subscription. And this was an especially challenging task because their course categories were not totally related to each other. 

These predicaments led the founders to hire me as GoSkills’ first head of marketing — to build out its marketing department, and create a customer acquisition engine that produced high-quality traffic from new sources as well as increased their organic search presence for their other course categories.

While the founders wanted to reach a new, more ideal audience, who wanted a course subscription, they obviously didn’t want to lose the certification seekers, who were finding their courses through bottom-of-the-funnel (BOF) keywords, like “Excel certification course.” 

So I created two personas. 

First, was the type of person we wanted to stay away from long-term (negative persona), because s/he increased our churn rate and had a low LTV. 

This person — “Certification-Seeking Carl,” as I called him — found GoSkills through their current acquisition channels — deal sites, keywords like “Excel certification,” and professional directory sites, like PMI.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was “Lifelong-Learner Lindsey” — our ideal persona, because she was a “serial learner” and highly motivated to keep adding new skills to her portfolio. She would increase LTV and decrease churn rates. Lindsey wouldn’t find us the same way Carl did though. 

Whereas Carl knew exactly what he wanted straight away, Lindsey wasn’t exactly sure, but she was totally open to endless possibilities and wouldn’t be a hard sell if we provided value in the form of amazing content that helped her grow her career.

According to my research, her go-to publications featured actionable career advice — places, like The Muse and Medium. She also followed a lot of work “influencers,” like Gary Vee and Tim Ferriss. 

My hypothesis was that Lindsey would be easy to convert so long as we created the highest quality content that helped her grow professionally and personally.  

Since she wouldn’t be searching directly for courses, we’d reach her through extremely high-caliber content marketing, as opposed to SERPs for high-intent keywords that Carl would use to find us. 

I emphasize “high-caliber” because, as a brand with little to no reputation, we needed to prove ourselves to the Internet. It also would make distribution a whole lot easier, and distribution is the key to not only getting lots of eyeballs on your website, but also to ranking in SERPs faster and increasing your brand authority.

In order to reach both personas simultaneously, I created a world-class content marketing program, which revolved around three types of on-site content: 

In-depth blog posts: I conducted a lot of keyword research for each category, by using Ahrefs’ competitive analysis feature to see the top posts of other sites whose content we wanted to emulate. Then, I’d steal the focus keyword and create a post way better than anything ranking on Google. 

10x, premium content: Think templates, PDFs, interactive content. These were created to be linked to in related category blog posts.

Pillar pages: This is the main page for a given category. They were like comprehensive guides that had strategic outlines, based on significant research, with the goal of not only ranking for important category keywords, but also helping us rank product pages for BOF keywords for each category.

Each of the above pieces of content fell into one of nine categories of courses we sold:

Microsoft Office

Coding

Soft skills

Project management

Design

Finance

Excel

Lean Six Sigma

Productivity 

Each piece of content published would be extremely easy to distribute because of its quality level, and therefore, each piece of content would have its own custom, strategic launch and distribution strategy.

made sure to include the word “launch” because every time you publish something, it needs to be “launched” or strategically distributed immediately. This sends a lot of signals to Google that your content is good, and it helps you rank faster. You want to get a lot of traffic fast, which should be easy if your content is good. 

I was working with a $10,000/month budget, and I used a big chunk of that for outsourcing content creation. This allowed me to get a lot of content done simultaneously. 

To start, I committed to a cadence of one in-depth blog post per week and one 10x content piece per month. Once that was under control, I recruited freelancers for the pillar pages.

NOTE: Most of these steps overlapped / happened simultaneously.

When I started at GoSkills, its “blog” was a mess.

It featured short, promotional, fluffy articles with poor visuals, and its overall design was overwhelming, difficult to navigate and highly unreadable. Because of this, GoSkills’ blog received little to no traffic. I knew we needed a complete overhaul of the current design, and that’s where I started. 

At the bare minimum, the blog needed to be enjoyable to read and easy to navigate between the different categories.

Because the GoSkills website and blog was custom-coded, I couldn’t implement the resource center myself (although had it been WordPress, I could’ve). 

So I worked with the developers to implement the designs I mocked up in Figma. The mockups included a single blog post page and a resource center homepage design.

Every element in my mockups had a reason for being there.

While the resource center was being coded, I reached out to prominent freelance writers, recruiting from sites like The Muse, Inc and Sumo. I also reached out to up-and-coming, influential YouTubers, like Francesco D’Alessio, so I could implement video into the mix.

I ended up hiring three proven writers — one I had previously worked with — to create comprehensive, well-written articles. I also hired a designer on Upwork, who I still work with today, to create useful blog post visuals, infographics and cheatsheets/PDFs. 

After the first month of publishing, traffic to the site increased a whopping 29 percent, and that percentage continually increased MoM. Dwell times increased dramatically as well.

Fun Fact: I input goskills.com into SerpStat, and the top posts driving the most traffic are posts I scoped and assigned out to freelance writers when I worked there. Can you say evergreen content?!

As I mentioned earlier, each blog post featured a downloadable lead magnet. I hired experts to create content, like 30 resume templates, custom project management templates and more. 

When I worked at GoSkills they had nine different course categories, and I was responsible for creating a pillar page for each one, with the goal of this helping our BOF pages rank higher (this made us look like an expert in Google’s eyes).  

If I tried to write these all myself, it would take forever to get all of them published, so instead, I outsourced these content pieces to writers, who specialized in each specific category, because that’d make the content more trustworthy to Google. 

I created detailed creative briefs to reduce the amount of editing I’d need to do once the writers turned them in, and this worked out well.

Marquee content, or 10x content is content that goes the extra mile — it’s interactive, it’s valuable, sometimes downloadable and always save-worthy. 

The first marquee content piece we published was, “200 Insanely Useful Excel Shortcuts.” 

It included an interactive page on the site, where visitors could download a PDF cheatsheet version. We also posted an infographic of the top 80 shortcuts on the blog, and we gave visitors an embed code to include it on their site if they wanted. 

Our first 10x piece went viral in the Excel subreddit, leading to Lifehacker and Business Insider syndicating it. 

Increased traffic by 29% in one month from this one piece of content

Ranked in Google the NEXT day after publishing for “Excel Shortcuts” (8,100/month search volume)

Received 237 upvotes and 35 comments in Excel SubReddit

Syndicated on Business Insider and Lifehacker 

My marketing intern conducted all the research for this piece. The development team brought it to life on the site, and I utilized my graphic designer for the visuals. Then I distributed and conducted the outreach for the content myself. 

GoSkills wanted to increase its brand awareness among college students as well as secure a significant amount of backlinks in just a few short months in order to increase its DA, to rank higher in Google. 

My solution? Invent a scholarship for female college students, who want to be their own boss someday, hence the title “#BetheBoss.”

The scholarship is still live today, and they’ve awarded at least $36,000 to 18+ female aspiring entrepreneurs since launch. 

Here’s how we did it.

First, I needed to figure out the logistics of the scholarship. I asked myself: 

Who can apply? I settled on female entrepreneurs because “women in tech” had/has been a huge issue, and so the focus was timely and easy to resonate with.

How do they apply? Applicants had to submit a business plan to apply, and answer a few questions. 

Where do they apply? Those interested can apply through the scholarship page on GoSkills website.

How many scholarships will be awarded each year? I decided that we should have two $2,000 scholarships awarded yearly, so we maintained the backlinks we earned all year long. 

When are the deadlines? The deadlines are set as: Sept. 15 and March 15 — perfect timing for fall and spring semesters, when students are scouring for scholarships.

When are the winners announced? The winners are announced a month later to give the team an ample amount of time to review the applications. 

How are applications reviewed? The applications are reviewed on merit — or rather how good the applicant’s business plan and answers to their questions were. 

What is the award amount? $2,000

After the details were approved, I designed the landing page.

I wrote the copy. 

I designed the landing page in Figma. 

Lastly, the developers coded the landing page that is still live to date. 

Last and certainly not least, I hired a website scraper to curate a long list of U.S. colleges that featured scholarships on its websites. Due to the size of the project, I recruited the help of an outreach consultant to help execute as well. 

We developed the email copy, then he set up an automated outreach campaign using Reply.io. Hundreds of email replies arrived in my inbox daily. 

109,000+ quality, do-follow links

Contributed to increasing DA from 26 to 71

By the first deadline, GoSkills received 100 scholarship applications, and the first winner has gone on to do big things with her startup. 

GoSkills still has this scholarship live to date, showing the true value of my idea.

Increased traffic from social by 389%

29+ percent increase in uniques 

Increased traffic from referrals by 82%

Top pages were all content pieces

Average post dwell time increased from ~30 seconds to nearly 6 minutes 

Traffic cost of ranking keywords decreased by 18% 

Number of organic keywords ranking increased by 15%+ MoM