Best Blogging Courses I Took to Earn $7k a Month from My Blog (with Zero Experience) - The Financial Cookbook, LLC (2024)

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These are the exact courses I took to earn $7,000 a month from my blog as a side hustle with absolutely no experience.

Blogging is a lot of work. It’s not hard, but it definitely takes a lot of time.

To be honest, if I had known how much work it would be, I probably would have never started. Therefore, I'm telling you EXACTLY what I did to earn $7k a Month in under a year with my blog, in the hope that it helps someone else. I had zero experience in websites and learned literally every single thing as I went (and you can too).

So many bloggers make it sound so easy with titles like “How I Make $25,000 a Month with My Blog”, etc. What they don’t tell you is how long it took to get there (10+ years usually), that they sell courses and products, and that they often have entire teams.

I keep it real on here, whether or not you’d like to hear it. Is starting and having a blog possible, even with a full-time job? Absolutely! I do it!

Related: Should I Start a Blog? The Truth About Blogging

Does my social life and sanity suffer? Yes! Lol Kidding….but really, it’s a give and take. (And yes, my sanity definitely suffers)

I sometimes don’t have any time in an entire week for my blog. Other times, I’m able to give a couple of hours 2 nights a week to it. I can’t give much more than that with a full-time job.

However, after 11 months of blogging, my website was able to make around $7,000 consistently. You can read my first blog income report here: How I Made $6,836 from Blogging as a Side Hustle in January 2022: Blog Income Report

I’d say that’s pretty amazing for such little time, especially as a side hustle.

In fact, if you’d like to learn step by step how I started my blog so that it can make money, you can feel free to follow my free tutorial where I break down every single step on how to start your own money-making blog.

I was able to do it by taking courses from people that have already had success. I definitely could NEVER have done it in a million years without taking these courses. In fact, I guarantee my blog wouldn't even have 10 page views if I hadn't taken all of these courses. I'm serious. It's THAT crucial (at least for me, who knew nothing about blogging).

In this post, you'll learn EXACTLY which courses I took that enabled me to grow my blog and make $7,000 a month as a side hustle with zero experience.

How My Blog Performed Before Taking Courses

I spent about 2 months trying to figure it out on my own and got so few views. See below for proof.

The worst part is, I'm pretty sure the majority of those views were from me, my man, and technical support helping me figure out some things.

I was spending SO MUCH TIME trying to drive traffic by perfecting my website…instead of doing the things that ACTUALLY drive traffic.

I was even pinning on Pinterest during that time!! Still, I got no views.

It's because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and had no strategy.

In fact, because I was trying so hard and failing for these 2 months, I actually gave up and burned myself out. Through the holidays, I stopped altogether and decided to pick it back up in the new year.

In fact, I didn't officially start taking it seriously until February 1st, 2021.

During those 2 months, I was doing all of the things, but seeing no results. I knew blogging was a long term game, but I also knew I would need tens of thousands of views in order to make money so this was going to take decades at my pace.

Here was one of my first pins…I wonder why I wasn’t getting any views…any idea? Haha!

I clearly had no idea what I was doing. The actual text at the bottom was cut off and I still posted it like that. There are so many things wrong it's not even funny. (P.S. here's that post on dividends in case it's got you curious now.=)

I had told myself that I would give the blog 2 years before I gave up since most professional bloggers say it can take 2-3 years to see your first penny. I figured I would just do it for fun.

However, when I start something, I go all in. It’s who I am.

Therefore, after 2 months of literally 7 real views (since it was all me, tech support, and my man looking at my website), I decided I needed to invest some money in courses to help me get more views to my website.

Related Articles about blogging you'll enjoy:

• How I Made $6,836 from Blogging as a Side Hustle in January 2022: Blog Income Report
• How to Launch a Blog with No Experience (in Under a Week)
• Blogging Tools
• How to Start a Blog from Scratch in 2022: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
• Review of Bluehost: Beginner’s Guide for New Bloggers
• Feminine Blog Themes You’ll Fall in Love With
• Should I Start a Blog? The Truth About Blogging
• Income Tracker Spreadsheet Download: What I Use to Track My Blog Revenue

How Did My Blog Generate Income in Under a Year?

How was I able to have such great success in such a small amount of time? I’ll tell you a secret that you can implement as well.

I learned from the professionals…on my own…by taking courses.

I would see these amazing headlines “How I Make $75k a Month Blogging”, etc. These blogs typically put out blogging courses explaining what they do to make that much money.

Since I started this blog as a true side hustle with some extra time during the pandemic and knew absolutely nothing about blogging, I knew I needed a faster way to reach success.

However, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money since I didn’t know if it would work out. In fact, I was super frugal with my money (and still am). It’s just how I run my life in general.

Tip: If you have a blog or small business, you need to track your expenses, and you can do so in my free income/expense tracker: Income Tracker Spreadsheet Download: What I Use to Track My Blog Revenue

I use it to track my blog revenue and my expenses.

In total, I took 5 courses over my first 1.5 years of blogging (I'm at the 1.5 year mark right now!) that taught me different aspects of blogging that helped me be successful.

To be honest, I actually took 7 courses, but 2 of them weren't helpful for me so I won't recommend them. However, I will talk about the 5 that were truly game changers for me and I will list them in the order I took them and explain why.

Big bloggers were saying Pinterest was the best place to start generating views since Google SEO takes a long time to see traction so that's exactly where I started.

Side note: Google SEO is Search Engine Optimization.

When you go to Google and type in a search inquiry, recommended websites will come up.

Your goal, as a blogger, is to get your website recommended for the millions of searches. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Anyways, since Pinterest could drive views right away, I decided I needed to invest in a Pinterest course first and take one from someone that knew what they were doing really well and had seen massive success.

Best Pinterest Course for Setting Up Your Account- Pinteresting Strategies

I did a LOT of research before choosing any of the courses I took….and I mean, a LOT. I didn’t want to waste money, especially since I have an amazing day job that I probably will never leave.

It was my passion to make a difference that drove me. With no page views, how could I make a difference in the world?

So after doing weeks of research on the best Pinterest course, there was one that kept coming up over and over as the best course.

It is called Pinteresting Strategies by Carly Campbell.

I purchased the course on January 26th, 2021 and I started implementing it at the end of February 2021.

This course helped me get from hardly any page views a month to 70,000 page views a month in just 7 months! See below for my Google Analytics! I couldn't believe it!

Carly is basically the godmother of Pinterest. She is seriously amazing.

She knows EVERYTHING about Pinterest, down to algorithm changes, and CEO updates, etc. It is WILD how much she knows.

She puts everything she knows into her course and then adds you to her special email list that will have continuous Pinterest updates every week.

After I took Carly’s course, I realized I was so off on my strategy, it was borderline discouraging. I realized I had wasted 4 months.

I had no idea SO MUCH went into Pinterest.

There is definitely a true science to it and I can pretty much guarantee that if you haven’t taken a Pinterest course, you are doing it wrong and probably aren’t seeing many views.

There are so many things that go into setting up your Pinterest account for it to be successful, including:

• Choosing the right type of Pinterest account
• Getting Verified
• Setting up the pin boards using keywords
• Writing your profile description with keywords
• Designing your pins
• Using certain colors
• Using particular fonts
• Using keywords in your pin titles
• Writing your pin descriptions with keywords and in a particular way
• The time of your pins
• The quantity of pins

When I tell you it is a science and very complicated, I really mean it. I was shocked to figure out how much goes into it.

Carly’s class will teach you everything you need to know about setting up your Pinterest account correctly so that Pinterest will push your content.

I thought I could learn it on my own through trial and error. Wrong. Totally wrong. Don’t even waste the time.

Invest the money (it's only the cost of a dinner) and move forward. Get your Pinterest going because that takes time as well.

I would say Pinterest takes 3-6 months and SEO takes 6 months to a year to see success. Pinterest is definitely the way to go to get your blog generating page views.

After taking Carly’s course and seeing fantastic success, I was seeing other accounts reaching hundreds of thousands of pageviews from Pinterest so I wanted to know their exact strategy to take my blog up a notch.

Best Pinterest Course for Design and Strategy- BSL Perfecting Pinterest

This took me to my 2nd course. The next course I took was By Sophie Lee’s Perfecting Pinterest.

This course was different from the first course in that this course will teach you pin design and Pinterest strategy.

Sophia makes $75k a month and gets millions of page views from Pinterest.

I wanted to learn her strategy as I knew she had also taken Carly’s course Pinteresting Strategies so I knew her course would be additional information over and above what we learned in Carly’s course.

Therefore, I bought her course and implemented her strategies.

With her course, I was able to reach 20 Million Impressions on Pinterest in one month alone!!

Now, remember, I first started taking my website and Pinterest seriously February of 2021, I bought the BSL course in June and this was in September of 2021…so just a couple of months I was able to reach that success!

(However, Pinterest has since changed their algorithm and I could no longer allot the amount of time I was giving to it, so I'm testing some new things. The impressions I was getting weren't translating to enough blog traffic so I needed to pivot my stratgy. Impressions are great and all, but I wasn't getting the correlating traffic to the website, which is my ultimate goal. Therefore, I have to alter my strategy as the Pinterest algorithms change, which Sophia will also describe in her course as she makes updates.)

Disclaimer: Now, I will say that I was ALSO implementing my own strategy in addition to her strategy so I do believe my strategy was 50/50 responsible for this success…so keep that in mind. (I may publish my strategy at one point, so stay tuned!)

I will publish it to my blogging email list if I release it so subscribe if you'd like updates! (Plus, you'll get a free blog income tracker for signing up)

In fact, you can see how my Pinterest was doing up until taking her course in June of 2021.

Crazy results, right!?

I had figured out the secret sauce (or learned the secret sauce I should say).

I really enjoyed her course because it teaches you everything you need to know about Pinterest, but shows her unique strategy and she shows you HOW she designs her pins via video.

I loved the format because I do well with video courses. It’s also written out, but I chose to watch the videos on double time to get through the course faster.

She has a VERY unique and specific Pinterest strategy so I started implementing EXACTLY what she does to try to start seeing additional traffic.

I highly recommend taking this course since it shows you how to design the pins, what her strategy is, and exactly how to write pin descriptions. For the money, it’s such an amazing value!

Plus, Sophia is so sweet and constantly updates her courses so I love that I’m in the know on what’s going on behind the scenes of her successful business. She also includes a Facebook group that gives assistance and is a great sounding board with other bloggers.

I’ve learned SO much just from the Facebook group alone!

After taking her Perfecting Pinterest course, the next course I decided to take was her blogging course. I knew I had everything I needed to be successful at Pinterest, and I was, so the next step was taking a blogging course to learn how to write my posts to rank in Google.

Best Blogging Course- BSL Perfecting Blogging

At this point, my Pinterest game was on point, but I was basically getting no traffic from Google whatsoever.

I was just writing my posts as if I was talking to a girlfriend…no headers (I didn’t even know what headers were and I had already written like 50 posts. Don’t be me….that was stupid, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know.)

I thought you could just write and then page views would come. LOL

That is so WRONG and borderline comical now. I can’t even believe I thought that…but I knew nothing about blogging or website traffic.

Literally every single thing you do on your website and every word you write is analyzed by Google in determining if they will rank your post. EVERYTHING. Every picture, every sentence, every title, you name it.

Therefore, I took BSL’s Perfecting Blogging course to learn exactly how to write my posts and what works for her successful website.

Tip: She runs a special on her courses where you can buy both the Pinterest course and the Blogging course at the same time to save some money. I'd recommend doing that!

Again, I loved the video format since she’s so easy to listen to.

She breaks it down in such an easy-to-understand way that it makes it a breeze to take.

I learned SO MUCH about:

• how to write a blog post line by line…literally
• the plugins needed
• the backend work that goes into it
• how to find keywords
• crucial tools that I use daily and couldn’t live without

It is SO worth it! She literally hand-holds you as though you were her best friend and she helps you set up your blog for success.

I went through and had to go back and change all of my previous blog posts, which was a major task that I’m still trying to get through 7 months later.

I wish I had bought her class from the beginning so I could have written my posts correctly from the beginning. Having to go back now takes so much time and my posts could have been ranking on Google this entire time so my site could have done so much better.

I beat myself up about that, but it’s a learning process.

I’m just glad I started learning SEO at 10 months versus 5 years later.

Trust me, invest in the class. Don’t waste your precious time writing posts that won’t rank. Learn from a professional like Sophia, save yourself time, and make your blog successful sooner rather than later.

After I started seeing my posts start to rank, I became curious about finding the right keywords to rank higher and faster.

Best SEO Course- Easy On Page SEO

The next course I took was a course all about SEO.

I truly didn't realize how much went into SEO until I took this class.

I did a TON of research and decided to buy the course called Easy On Page SEO by Debbie Gardner, who is KNOWN for her SEO knowledge.

She is amazing and she’s in so many blogging forums helping other bloggers for free.

I knew I had to get her course.

Her class was perfect for beginners as I was able to learn how to write a blog post, what to look for, keywords to use, and many other strategies.

Her course comes as a 150 page ebook LOADED with information. It will take you a bit to go through it, but it has so many insider tips, tools, and knowlegde that it's absolutely amazing and should be your blue print foundation for your blog.

I’d recommend taking her course first because it will help lay the foundation of your blog.

After you've taken a beginners course like this one, you can move on to an intermediate course like the next course I took.

Keywords Course for Blogging that Changed the Game– Stupid Simple SEO

Once I was understanding SEO better, my strategy just wasn't working and I still wasn't seeing the results I wanted from Google. Pinterest was doing great, but Google views were super low. I knew I needed a keyword strategy in place.

I did a TON of research to decide what to take because I'm so frugal with my money.

After months and months of debating, I finally decided to take Stupid Simple SEO as Mike Pearson is known in the industry and his course has rave reviews.

The other courses I mentioned above CLEARLY took my blog to a new level so for me to say that this course changed the game….um…you better believe I have stats to back it up.

I bought SSSEO in March of 2022, but didn't finish the course until May and started implementing it in June…very slowly. I would change one thing one week and another thing another week since this is a side hustle and time is limited.

I didn't think I'd see results very quickly because I just didn't have the time to implement all of his strategies…but look what happened! Even with those small changes I was making each week, my blog started picking up major rankings in Google!!

This course changed the game for me and got me to 40,000 sessions a month just from Google alone in a matter of 4 months!!! Look at my organic search Google Analytics!!! These are Google sessions ONLY!!

Isn't that insane!?

(Let's provide a reminder that this blog is a side hustle I do a couple hours maximum per week…sometimes not at all. In fact, I haven't worked for a minute on it the past 4 weeks because I've been so busy with my normal job, life, etc. And yet, my Google traffic has continued to grow.)

I held off for about a year because Mike's course was on the pricier side.

I told myself I could learn it on my own or learn with trial and error, etc. Wrong.

I waited months and months to take Mike’s course because I didn’t want the expense of it and figured I could figure it out on my own.

Wrong again, girlfriend.

I kept reading from major bloggers that Mike's course changed the entire game for them and I saw these crazy metrics (like mine above).

I thought that's good for them, but that will never happen for me…but what if I tried?

The more I researched blogging, the more I reazlied that I have no keyword strategy and to be successful, I would need to get a keyword strategy into place.

Mike offers a free SEO webinar so I decided to take that (and I recommend you do too) to walk before I ran…

As I took the free webinar, I was realizing that if I TRULY wanted to give this blogging thing a shot and wanted to drive massive amounts of traffic, I needed to learn his strategy for finding keywords that you can rank for,based on your exact website ability!

Let me say that again…for your exact website. Not for “any” website, but for your exact website, based on how google sees you.

He teaches you his exact strategy that WORKS!

Therefore, I decided to dive head first and buy his course. This course is fairly expensive, but hear me out.

This course is SO WORTH IT!!!

WOW. Just, wow.

Mike’s course will teach you things you never even thought of.

It’s definitely more of an intermediate to advanced course though so I would take the BSL Perfecting Blogging course first and then take SSSEO.

Mike will teach you how to find keywords that will rank in Google. In fact, his unique approach gave me blogging ideas for the next couple of years.

In addition to that, I learned so much I didn’t know, that I didn’t even realize was part of the course. He goes into detail on basically everything related to blogging, all the way down to how to get featured in big publications.

In fact, from his lessons, I have been featured over 15 times in publications like Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, Go Banking Rates, Thrive Global. BuzzFeed and more!

You will learn:

• How to Use Ahrefs
• How to Find Keywords that you can rank for
• Affiliate marketing
• How to be featured in big publications
• How to organize your blogging ideas
• How to find competitors
• How to use competitor keywords

This course has already paid for his class and more in just a few months!

I’m telling you, his course is beyond worth it!

He also offers a FREE SEO webinar that was also helpful so if you aren't sure, take that first to see if you want to enroll in the advanced class. I'm telling you…it's only been 4 months and it was worth every penny and more! I can't wait to implement the rest of his strategies!!

Blogging Courses I Took Summary

I hope this was helpful! In summary, you should focus on Pinterest first and take some courses there, then learn SEO, and then take Mike's course on keyword strategy to drive your page views.

I'm really glad I took the courses in the order I did because it allowed me to focus on perfecting certain things first before moving on to the next. Otherwise, I would have gotten overwhelmed.

Related Articles about Blogging

• How I Made $6,836 from Blogging as a Side Hustle in January 2022: Blog Income Report
• How to Launch a Blog with No Experience (in Under a Week)
• Blogging Tools
• How to Start a Blog from Scratch in 2022: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
• Review of Bluehost: Beginner’s Guide for New Bloggers
• Feminine Blog Themes You’ll Fall in Love With
• Should I Start a Blog? The Truth About Blogging
• Income Tracker Spreadsheet Download: What I Use to Track My Blog Revenue

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at lisa@thefinancialcookbook.com

You’ve got this!

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