Blogging, SEO and Affiliate Courses: Questions and Thoughts

Do you think that you need to buy blogging, SEO, or Affiliate courses to make money from your WordPress site?

There are many courses out there ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.

Some of them even require a yearly subscription, so you better copy and paste their secrets on a Word document before time runs out.

I am not gonna tell you what to do or how to spend your money but these are some pretty good points that you should consider before buying a blogging course.



Blogging, SEO, and Affiliate Experts in Low-Competition Niches

If you have access to some of the most popular blogging courses out there, you will often find that these so-called experts suggest starting websites in low-competition niches.

They also recommend writing content about low-competition or long-tail keywords to avoid competing with the big sites

I have nothing against starting a website in a low-competition niche since that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, but you should keep in mind that most of the courses out there regardless of what they are called should be rebranded to something like:

  • How to Make Money Blogging in Low-Competition Niches.
  • How to Make Money Blogging with Long-Tail Keywords.

As I said before, there is nothing wrong with that approach, I am just stating the obvious.

Is Expert advice on how to dominate low-competition niches worth $600?


Experts and Their Advice: Summary

I recently watched a video about one of the experts pretty much calling out well-known experts and the tools they use.

I was like, how can a king of blogging in low-competition niches criticize or contradict people who do SEO for a living in competitive niches?

Those so-called experts are trying to sell you the idea that you don’t need keyword tools, SEO Plugins, and Backlinks and that the only thing you will ever need to be a successful blogger is their course.


Blogging, SEO, and Affiliate Experts and Their Secrets

One of the reasons why people buy courses is because they expect to find the recipe for Coca-Cola in them.

When they buy a course, they find that there is nothing special in them or nothing that hasn’t been taught already on YouTube.

If you don’t know how to do Keyword research, you can get a pretty good idea by watching YouTube videos, reading previous discussions in groups, and reading blogs.

This user summarizes the thoughts of a majority of users when asked about paid courses:

Courses are intended to save you time, there are no real secrets.


Blogging, SEO, and Affiliate Experts and their Communities

Sometimes what you are paying for when you buy blogging courses is access to a community.

I assume that their conversations in those groups should be better than the ones that take place in public forums.

So what you need is 6 hours of video and then discuss the topics you have questions about with fellow bloggers.

So you are paying hundreds of dollars to some guy and other guys pay hundreds of dollars to be there too and you answer each other questions while the expert is on the way to the bank.


Blogging, SEO, and Affiliate Experts Who Got Lucky

There is more competition in the blogging space today than ever before.

If you started a blog ten, twelve, or fifteen years ago and you are making tons of money with it but you can’t replicate that level of success again, you just got lucky.

Some people trying to sell blogging courses today know their stuff but if you follow their journey with their additional sites, you will see that their new sites are not even close to the success of the first blog they started by accident.


Marketers Thirsty for Money

What you learn from the big influencers in the making-money blogging space is how these guys are at marketing.

They wrap what is already out there and they get to sell it to people desperate for leaving the 9-to-5 behind.

Nowadays, everyone wants to sell you a course, the guy who makes 90k a month, the lady who makes 10K and the new kid after he finds out how badly people wanna make a quick buck.

Twitter and YouTube are filled with those types of people, all of them sharing their journey, and income reports, some of them are honest but some of them are hoping to get a fan base to introduce a course, a service, a PDF with the same old info or they simply want your email address so get the interest of advertisers.


Analyze the Expert Sites

If you find the so-called expert websites, you will probably find that there is nothing special about their themes, plugins, the speed of the sites, etc.

You can try to imitate their success not by buying their courses but by doing what they have done for their sites.

  • I understand that Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits has zero intentions of selling you a course, you can learn about what he did by checking OwnTheYard.com
  • You can learn from Matt Giovanisci by listening to the content he produces and checking what he has done for Swim University.
  • John Dykstra also revealed his portfolio to his students so everyone should know what his small sites or big site already is by now.
  • TheOneHourProfessor sold his main website more than a year ago, you can learn more about what was part of his strategy by checking JobForTeensHQ
  • Authority Hacker owns a pet site that was used or built as part of his Authority Hacker System or Authority Hacker Pro

Final Thoughts

These are my final thoughts about everything related to blogging, SEO, and Affiliate courses.

  • I don’t blame anyone for making money out of their followers these days, it is what everyone is doing.
  • Nobody is here to teach you how to blog for free, people will try to get paid somehow for investing time to create resources.
  • Influencers, so-called experts, and experts are not running charities.
  • Making money blogging is like a bubble, there are moments when desperate people buy all courses available out there and there are moments when skepticism prevails.
  • I understand some experts trying to get a return, it seems fair after all the free content they have shared but every now and then, you will listen to strangers in Podcasts claiming they know how to blog who also want $700 for their newly-created courses.
Shame Gif
  • Keep in mind that sometimes blogging courses want you to do stuff you have been trying to avoid all along like building quality backlinks and taking your content to new heights. That’s it.
  • Finally, not all courses are ways the experts grab your money and put it in their pockets, some of them really answer questions, questions that you probably haven’t asked yourself, so before buying a course, ask yourself what question will be answered in the course, if you sort of know the answer already, you probably don’t know the course.

More about Monetization

These are some posts that you might want to read before you leave:

  1. LMS Plugins: Honest Review
  2. I didn’t get my Adsense Payment
  3. Ezoic Publishers: Their Most Common Mistakes
  4. Ad.Plus Review: As Honest as It Gets
  5. How to Lazy Load Ads
  6. How to Increase Ad Viewability
  7. Ad Inserter Review: Love it or Leave it
Manuel Campos, English Professor

Manuel Campos

I am José Manuel. I am writing about things I know and things that I am learning about WordPress. I hope you find the content of this blog useful.

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