When it comes to making money with my blog, I’m way behind many other bloggers, and ahead of some others. One of the things that has helped me is investing in my own education, in three important areas: affiliate marketing, attracting traffic, and email marketing. Today I’m sharing the self-paced, online, take-from-anywhere courses that have helped me. Maybe one of them can help you too.

Disclosure: Links in this post (and anywhere on The Savvy Solopreneur) may be affiliate links. Find out what that means here.

Just to clarify, these are the courses that helped me make money with my blog. They are certainly not how-to-write or how-to-blog courses, though I’ve taken a few of those too. I started taking how-to-write courses so long ago the first couple of courses I took are defunct now. If you need help with your writing skills specifically I recommend the Write Your Way to 1K course. If you have the writing thing nailed, and are ready to tackle the business side of blogging, these are the courses that helped me transition from hobby blogging to running a money making blog.

Making sense of Affiliate Marketing

This is an amazing course from Michelle Schroeder Gardener who runs the wildly successful personal finance blog Making Sense of Cents. I’m still trying to work out how she’s made millions of dollars from a blog that is basically teaching her readers how to save money and be frugal (as well as how to make extra money and pay down debt).

Her affiliate marketing course teaches everything from how to find affiliate programs for your niche to how to write blog posts that make a ton of affiliate sales, and how to use social media to make affiliate sales.

It also covers the fiddly tech and admin stuff, like how to tidy up your affiliate links and make them no-follow, how to disclose your affiliate marketing activity, and a ton of other stuff I didn’t know I needed to know.

Plus, you get access to a private Facebook group where Michelle regularly runs ‘Ask Me Anything’ threads, meaning you kind of get your ongoing group coaching in the area of affiliate marketing, with the chance to have your own personal queries and issues addressed.

I was already making a regular but modest income from affiliate marketing long before I took this course, but I learned so much in a few short weeks that helped me make more. I never recommend a paid course unless I think it’s 100% worth every cent you pay for it, and for me, this one really was, as I made about ten times more in affiliate marketing than I spent on the course, in quite a short amount of time. Find out more about the course here.

Pindepth Advanced

Once you have your blog set up to make money from affiliate marketing, you’ll need to send plenty of traffic to that blog. Only a tiny number of your visitors will convert to paying customers by actually buying something from your blog, and that’s OK. Blogging should be about sharing your ideas and knowledge for free. However, if you know that only about 1 or 2 % of your blog visitors buy from you, you’ll understand the importance of driving LOTS of traffic to your blog.

If you’ve read my Pinterest series you’ll know that Pinterest is my number one traffic source these days, and it is mostly a FREE traffic source (unless you want to splash out on promoted Pins). I learned everything I needed to know about Pinterest Marketing from the Pindepth Advanced online course.

It includes four hours of video training, actionable workbooks, a private Facebook group, and a ton of bonuses (including two bonus courses, Content That Converts and The Subscriber Rush). Plus, you get lifetime access (I’ve been through the course twice already). Every time Pinterest rolls out something new, more information is added to the course, so you’re constantly updated. Check out the details here.

The Digital Marketer’s Quickstart Guide to Profitable Funnels

This one is a highly valuable course all about email marketing, or more specifically creating profitable funnels that will help you sell to your email subscribers, whether you sell your own products or those of affiliate partners. This course includes a sequence of video lessons that will walk you through:

• Determining your ultimate funnel goal
• Creating a killer opt-in incentive
• Creating funnel pages and connecting them to your autoresponder
• Creating a follow-up sequence

There is a video, a transcript, slides, a workbook and a resource sheet for each stage in the process. If you’re not even sure what some of this means, don’t worry. This one is aimed at beginners and will explain everything clearly. Learning to build a proper funnel and to use email marketing effectively is a vital step to earning more money from your blog.

Many people don’t realise it, but the vast majority of blogging income tends to come from your email subscribers rather than your general blog audience. They are the people who cared enough about your topic to get on your list, and are probably much more interested in it and committed to it than those who just read your blog occasionally. Find all the details here.

I hope you find something here that could be useful for you. If you’re ready to move from hobby blogger to money blogger (or side hustle to significant income) I recommend focusing on affiliate marketing, traffic and email marketing.

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