Image Credit: Prima Vista
The obvious next step after unlearning is relearning. This is the most exciting part of the process as the skills that you acquire may excel you to a bright future. However, finding quality online marketing education can be difficult and costly. There are numerous of charlatans on and off the web promising to make you a social media expert if you just take up on their special limited time offer for the first 10000 people that sign up all for the low price of ($ ) – fill in the blank.
You certainly don’t want to be wasting your time or money, so why not get quality education for free? Quality and free, you might be thinking I’m crazy as often those two words never mix together in the real world.
However, Hear me Out:
I recently took part as a student in the first ever Inbound Marketing University (IMU) hosted by Hubspot. Wanting to strengthen my inbound marketing knowledge, IMU was the perfect choice. And what is inbound marketing you may ask?
According to Wikipedia:
“Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.” As opposed to “Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising (Trying to get attention).”
Of course there is a deeper meaning and importance than just what Wikipedia spits out. Because now it is more important than ever to educate ourselves of how marketing is changing with the influence of the internet.
What is IMU?
As defined on the website, “IMU is a free marketing retraining program for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.” It consists of ten, hour long webinars, one review session, and a certification exam. All the webinars are given by online greats such as Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin and more. They teach you everything from basics of blogging and social media to advanced SEO techniques.
Here are some of the webinars that you go through:
- How to Blog Effectively
- SEO Crash Course
- Social Media and Building a Community
- Successful Business uses for Facebook and LinkedIn
- Advanced SEO Tactics
- Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices
See a full class schedule and instructors here. And for the presentation slides check out HubSpot’s SlideShare page.
At the End of it All…
You receive knowledge and skills at an unbeatable price of FREE. But don’t think this is a bird university as according to Rebecca Corliss of HubSpot there was in total 5000 people who registered for IMU, 1000 took the exam, and 500 passed. So study hard as the passing grade is 75%!
The next IMU will take place in August and you can register for it here. I encourage anyone who is interested in increasing their knowledge in inbound marketing to register for this week long university.
For the Skeptics:
How can it be free? Just tell me the catch!
No catch… It is free because the nice guys at HubSpot are putting their money where their mouth by executing the same strategies that are a taught in IMU. Offer tremendous value to your clients and monitize an additional product or service that uses the value you passed on. HubSpot offers inbound marketing software and if you choose to get advanced then you might as well choose them as they have provided you with a great benefit of helping you understand all the neat inbound marketing stuff.
