

Am I right?
I’ve got an aunt that wouldn’t agree with that sentiment. She’s a devout contrarian and would rather spend months on Google stubbornly foraging together random bits of information instead of buying a blogging course –like trying to put a puzzle together without a box cover to show her where the pieces go.
She was oblivious to the resulting gaps in knowledge and time wasted. In the end she gave up and said that anyone claiming to make money with a blog is lying. She thinks I’m lying.
“Your son is probably a drug dealer. There’s no way he can afford to travel full-time unless he’s doing something illegal”.
If you want to make money blogging quicker than most others, don’t be my aunt.
Click here to skip the article portion of this guide and get right to our blogging course recommendations.
Table of Contents
A great blogging course will help you earn money faster, so you don’t wind up like a broad majority of bloggers who give up within the first year (and before they make their first commission).
This guide will help you cut through the hype that surrounds most blogging courses to ensure you make an informed purchase decision.
Not all successful bloggers are good teachers. They may have receipts for their success, but their course could still be shit.
Each blogging course we’ve reviewed in this lineup is a surefire winner. I’ll introduce you to them one by one, and share my thoughts on each of them so you know what to expect.
However, before we get into it I’d like to explain what really makes any blogging course valuable, and how you might want to approach your blogging journey from the very beginning.
Making the move to become a full-time blogger is often a leap of faith, one that we bring the people who financially rely on us along for the ride.
Although we bloggers often make it look easy, starting a blog and earning money with it is no simple feat. Website visitors often don’t see the years of repeated failures or the stress on close relationships that may go into them in the beginning.
Your partner in life and/or your family need you to succeed. And a blogging course will eliminate some of the risk involved.
This short buyer’s guide will help you avoid paying for blogging courses that are so bad they should pay you for taking them, and shorten the distance between stress and success by getting it right in your first go!
We’ll explore what should be covered in detail within a good blogging course, and how to avoid paying for one that only does the bare minimum for you.
To date I’ve reviewed numerous courses on blogging to ensure I did it right, even after I found success in blogging –and I still find areas where I’ve left money on the table.
Today we earn thousands of dollars per month in passive income with this blog alone, in addition to the other affiliate blogging websites we run on the side. The income far exceeds anything I made back home in Canada from some Liberty Village cubicle in Toronto.
With every rinse and repeat, and every new blogging project we start, we earn money faster, and greater, by an order of magnitude because we invested in good blogging courses.
Our experience is highlighted by the lifestyle benefits of blogging we enjoy, like never worrying about where our next paycheck is coming from, traveling full-time, and serving no master beyond our own needs and interests.
Successful bloggers have a flavor of sovereignty many desire but few achieve.
I haven’t had a “real job” for 10 years! Saying it aloud feels euphoric.
Starting a successful blogging business has more to do with your direction at the very beginning than the tools you use, and too many blogging courses give people what they think they want, and not enough of what they actually need.
When people start thinking about starting a blog, they almost always begin by obsessing over blogging platforms and tools because they have the preconceived misconception that technology is where their blogging journey begins.
Tech is usually the first question, and the question that blogging beginners often spend the most time on. Getting obsessed with tools is mentally exhausting.
Try not to fall into the WIX trap —they make it easiest to start a blog, but they own the ‘land’ it’s built on. Not ideal for professional bloggers.
The best blogging courses will go to great lengths to explain soft topics like niche selection, audience reconnaissance, and the concepts you need to understand before they show you how to build a blog.
Tools come and go, but the thought process that goes into creating a successful blog is timeless and repeatable.
If you’d like some more background into learning about blogging before you buy a course, check out this section of our website.
Click here to skip the article portion of this guide and get right to our blogging course recommendations.
There’s a paradigm shift that must happen when you take any blogging course, and I talk about it all the time on this blog –where you go from thinking like a consumer to thinking like a business owner. That takes time.
Give your full attention to any course creator that’s willing to spend twenty minutes explaining the finer points of identifying an audience, profitable niche selection, “the buyer’s journey”, and so on. That information will make or break your efforts a year down the line.
Be patient with longer videos in online courses. Those conversational videos where it seems there’s no actionable step. Sometimes the only actionable step is to listen and allow what’s being said to percolate.
The best lessons are psychological, and they won’t fit into a 3 minute video.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions”.
– Albert Einstein
You could be actively making mistakes for months or years without knowing it because you missed something, or your blogging course fell short.
Most blogging courses I’ve reviewed over the years try to follow a formula where they keep videos short and actionable for brevity –which is good when you’re dealing with technical tutorials, but less so when it comes to organically forming the ideas that are required to make ‘fuck you money’ down the line.
Six hundred dollars per month of passive income after your first year is cool. But you know what’s cooler? Ten thousand dollars per month.
And it’s usually not the technology that makes the difference between financial outcomes, it’s all in the pre-planning, before you put shovels in the dirt.
You can learn how to install WordPress for free anywhere on the internet. But the lessons that kick off the big bang of your paradigm shift will likely be absent.
And it isn’t for a lack of trying, I’m sure of it. The concepts and strategies you must consider before starting a blog are hard to articulate and express in a way that’s easy to understand.
And because they’re hard to put into words, course creators will often gloss over them within their blogging course with a two-minute video.
Not all successful bloggers are good teachers. As I’ve already said –they may have receipts for their success, but their course could still be shit.
The role of the course creator is to get you past a finish line –they often don’t really care if you’re bronze, silver, or gold.
You won’t be able to tell a low-quality blogging course from its reviews, because students don’t know what they aren’t being taught. They’re oblivious when they leave their review because the hard lessons don’t happen until later. And by that time the circus has moved onto another town.
A blogging course scam won’t spend ample time on foundational concepts like audience reconnaissance, competitive research, niche selection, keyword usage, how to write copy that generates profit, email marketing, or diversifying your income sources.
A low-quality blogging course will only show you how to do the bare minimum, and avoid answering the bigger question; how does blogging work?
In some cases, low-quality blogging courses will subtly focus on selling you things that they themselves profit from –their affiliate offers. They will focus on expensive, advanced tools, and you’ll recognize this immediately when you look at the length of each of their videos –where’s the bulk of their time spent?
Pushing advanced tools just adds to the learning curve, too. And most people never finish the courses they buy, or the tools they’re sold along with it.
You could make money affiliate blogging with a factory install of WordPress. You don’t need bells and whistles at the onset of your blogger’s journey.
Psychology is everything.
Now that we’ve covered some of the soft topics involved in choosing the best blogging course and how to approach learning to blog –let’s look at a handful of different blogging courses we’ve reviewed ourselves, fill you in on what sets them apart from the rest, and why we think they’re worth your time.
This free blogging course was created by us –your friends at Hobo with a Laptop, and is part one of a series.
We’re currently updating it to reflect changes in the WordPress platform, so watch this space for when it becomes available again. For now, check out our written guide here!
Take a deeper look at this course.
This lightweight course on blogging has everything in it that you need to blog profitably, without information overload. The strength of this course is its conversational format, and the course creator’s ability to explain a wide range of complex foundational concepts in simple terms that are easy to understand.
This course is tailored specifically to address the shortcomings of other popular blogging courses, which makes it valuable on its own, or as a companion to other blogging resources. Some of the advice in this course has never been seen in a blogging course!
If you’ve ever wanted to get inside the twisted mind of an experienced blogger, Mike lays out his ruthless approach to niche selection, audience reconnaissance, competitor research, search engine optimisation, Twitter trolling for boat bucks, and keyword usage to rack up the affiliate commissions that make up his passive income.
What sets this course apart and makes it enjoyable is its casual approach to lectures, which are designed to be enjoyed with or without sitting in front of your computer in cases where the subject matter isn’t technical, sort of like a podcast or an ebook. This is great for people who don’t like to have their eyes locked to a screen for the duration of the entire course. However, some students won’t appreciate this unorthodox approach and may prefer to choose to learn blogging from another course creator on this list.
Take a deeper look at this course.
This more economically-priced blogging course is by Brad Merrill of Merrill Media. You can pick it up for $12 on Udemy when they’re running a promotion, or $129.99 at regular price.
Take a deeper look at this course.
Of all the blogging courses we reviewed on our Udemy spending spree, I found Brad’s course to be the best one available on this popular elearning marketplace. His presentations are professional and clean, and his business-like approach to course creation provides precisely enough information to satisfy the student and solve the challenge he’s addressing in each video.
The strength of this blogging course lies in its production value, and it covers much of what a blogger will need to understand before they start a blog, at a general level. Although very referential with little explanation at times, his focus on content creation checks a lot of boxes, and will be incredibly helpful for beginners.
Where I found this course lacking somewhat was in its deficit of anecdotal information that comes from the experience of running a successful blog for a number of years. It’s clear his perspective is from that of an agency, and not a seasoned blogger.
Foundational concepts were explained in 3 short videos. Advice given for identifying a niche pointed inward, like “what are you into?” –and while that’s all well and good, and important to consider, it didn’t focus enough on qualifying a blog idea from a dollars and cents perspective.
This course will absolutely help you launch a blog and get going –but there’s techniques and strategies that are absent in this course and that means you’re learning more about blogging mechanics than generating a profit.
Take a deeper look at this course.
This strategy-heavy course suite was created by our new friends at Create and Go, and it is all you need to start a blog and make six figures. Yep, six figures.
This course bundle is an amalgamation of the following courses, with extras; Launch Your Blog Biz, Pinterest Traffic Avalanche, and Six-Figure Blogger.
You can also buy these courses individually. If you’d like to buy a course a la carte, check out their “which course is right for me?” roadmap.
Of all courses on this roundup, the Pro Blogger Bundle contains the best blogging courses by far –because it teaches bloggers everything one needs to know to get tons of free traffic to a blog, and then how to convert that traffic into actual dollars in a way that other courses fall short.
As experienced bloggers who run multiple blogs, we’ve audited courses by Create and Go before and we know that they walk the walk. Alex and Lauren are excellent instructors, they leave no relevant question unanswered, and their support delivers results.
Their grasp of affiliate blogging, digital product creation (ebooks, courses, et al), Pinterest, and Instagram through the eyes of a beginner helps them articulate exactly how to teach what you need to know, when you need to know it.
Even though we already earn enough money blogging to make it our sole income, Oshin learned enough from Pinterest Traffic Avalanche to increase our blog’s profitability almost overnight.
In my experience their lessons don’t fall short. They update their blogging courses on a regular basis for completeness, and are available in a support capacity when you need it.
This bundle will teach you how to start a blog from scratch, and then keeps going. I highly recommend saving some money and opting for the bundle –buying the included courses a la carte will just be more expensive than it needs to be.
Take a deeper look at this course bundle. If you’d like to buy a course a la carte, check out their “which course is right for me?” roadmap.
If you’re less interested in making money with a blog and want to jump straight into creating your own online courses, we highly recommend you check out our course builder guide.
We offer a bunch of tips, advice, and gear suggestions for creating a profitable course in a weekend, and then recommend an additional course called “Courpreneur X” by James Burchill.
That’s where you’ll find us –we left Facebook years ago.
And that’s a wrap for today. If you found this article useful or have another blogging course suggestion, hit us up in the comments below.
Curious about how technology shapes our lives, minds. Big picture thinker, observer, catalyst, husband, father, and based digital nomad. Mike is responsible for content, design, and research at Hobo with a Laptop.
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