Investing in the right blogging courses — and then actually doing the work — can completely change your financial life. I know, because it changed mine.
I started this blog in 2015. For the first year, I made basically nothing because I was guessing at everything.
Then I started investing in courses, and something clicked. Now I run multiple blogs, I semi-retired at the end of 2021, and the income from my sites is a real, meaningful part of the financial independence we’ve built as a family.
None of that happened by accident. It happened because I got better at my craft.
This post is my honest run-down of the courses that actually moved the needle for me — the ones I’d recommend to a friend, not just the ones that pay the best commissions. I’ve taken a lot of duds over the years (not naming names, but some of them rhyme with “Elite Blog Academy”). The courses below are the ones worth your money.
A note on course availability: the blogging education space is constantly changing. I’ve flagged below where anything has shifted since I first published this post.
Quick Picks: No Time? Here’s the Rundown
- Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing – best first course for total beginners ($197)
- Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers – strong alternative if you’re not in personal finance ($79)
- Traffic Transformation – the guide that got me past 15k pageviews ($79)
- Stupid Simple SEO – the SEO course for bloggers who are serious ($497)
Best Blogging Courses for Beginners
When you’re starting out, the temptation is to learn everything at once. Don’t. In my experience, there are two skills a new blogger needs to focus on to get a blog that actually earns money: affiliate marketing and traffic generation. Everything else can wait.
Get those two things right and you can build from there. Get them wrong and you’ll spend two years writing posts that nobody reads and nobody buys from.
1. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Price: $197
This was the course that took me from $0 to $1,000 a month in affiliate income. I enrolled fairly early on and absorbed everything I could.
The course creator, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, is a personal finance blogger who makes well over $100k a month. What I liked about her course was that it was practical and specific. She shows you how to write posts designed to convert affiliate sales — not just pretty content that happens to have a few links dropped in. That sounds obvious, but it genuinely isn’t when you’re new.
I still recommend it years later because Michelle updates it regularly (it was last updated in December 2025), and the price is reasonable for what you get. The private Facebook community is active, which matters more than people realise when you’re trying to problem-solve in the early stages.
What I didn’t love: Michelle makes a significant chunk of her income promoting a web hosting company I’m not a fan of. I won’t name them, but they rhyme with “pootoast.” There’s nothing wrong with promoting hosting — I recommend Siteground — but it can create the impression that the only way to make money blogging is by telling other people to start a blog. That’s not true. I wrote a whole post about why that bothers me.
The course also doesn’t cover SEO or more advanced traffic strategies. But for a beginner? It’s excellent. It can realistically get you to a part-time income while you save up for the more advanced stuff.
Learn more about Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing >>
2. Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers – Everything You’re Missing
Price: $79
I was a beta tester for this course when Carly Campbell first launched it, and if it had existed when I was a beginner I would have taken this over MSOAM — at less than half the price.
Carly is a blogging legend who doesn’t get nearly enough credit. She writes primarily about parenting and postpartum topics, which means her course is perfect for anyone who is not in the personal finance or blogging-about-blogging niche. She proves, convincingly, that you don’t need to blog about making money to make money blogging.
Her approach is sharp, no-fluff, and focused on posts that pull both ad revenue and affiliate income. For under $80, this is outstanding value.
Learn more about Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers >>
3. The Pinterest Launch Plan by JenniferMaker
Price: $27
Technically, this is an ebook delivered via Teachable — JenniferMaker herself calls it “a strategy, not a full-fledged course.” It’s a 101-page guide with videos and worksheets that walks you through setting up Pinterest from scratch and using it to drive blog traffic.
A few things worth saying about Pinterest in 2026: it’s not as easy as it was in 2019. The platform has matured, the algorithm rewards fresh content and consistency, and you can’t just pin the same images for years and expect results. But it still works — especially for lifestyle, personal finance, home, food, and DIY niches — and it’s one of the best traffic sources for new bloggers who haven’t built up SEO authority yet. Search traffic takes time. Pinterest traffic can come much faster.
JenniferMaker is a craft and DIY blogger who makes well over $100k a month. She knows what she’s doing. For $27, this is a steal.
Learn more about The Pinterest Launch Plan >>
4. Pinteresting Pins on Autopilot & Pinterest Mastermind
Price: $15/month
Once you understand Pinterest’s strategy, the next bottleneck is usually pin creation. This is Carly Campbell’s membership, and it’s reduced my pin-creation time by about 90%. You get Canva templates delivered monthly, a paid Facebook mastermind where Carly shares her ongoing Pinterest experiments, and ongoing updates as the platform evolves.
It’s not a course — it’s an ongoing membership. But at $15 a month it’s one of the better value subscriptions in the blogging space.
Learn more about Pinteresting Pins on Autopilot >>
Blogging Courses for Intermediate Bloggers
Once you’ve got the basics working, the gaps tend to show up clearly. You’re creating content, but traffic isn’t growing. Or you’re getting traffic but it’s not converting. Here’s where I’d go next.
5. Traffic Transformation
Price: $79
This guide by Lena Gott changed my blogging business. Full stop.
I was stuck at 15,000 pageviews a month for so long I’d started seriously considering just becoming a blogger’s VA instead. After working through Traffic Transformation, I broke that plateau and eventually qualified for Mediavine.
That meant regular, predictable monthly ad income — which changed everything about how I could invest back into the blog.
The guide covers 21 strategies for growing traffic without just working harder. A lot of it is about your existing content: improving it, optimising it, understanding what’s already working and replicating it. One of the early steps gets you to drop a bunch of low-payback tasks (all those pin-to-every-thread-you-can-find activities). I stopped them all and saw zero drop in traffic. Got five hours a week back. Five hours is a big deal when you’re a work-at-home mum.
It’s also a PDF, which means I can read it on my Kindle in bed, with the screen dimmed, while the kids are asleep next to me. Small thing. Not nothing.
Learn more about Traffic Transformation >>
6. Stupid Simple SEO
Price: $497 (standard) — not always open for enrolment
Mike Pearson’s SEO course is the one you need when you’re ready to get serious about Google traffic. And by “serious” I mean prepared to do a lot of work upfront for income that can pay off for years.
The course covers keyword research, competitor analysis, site structure, writing content that ranks, and link building. The Facebook group is full of successful bloggers who actually answer questions. Mike himself is active in there.
The course opens a limited number of times a year, so if it’s currently closed there’s a waitlist. He also offers a free 5-day SEO bootcamp which is genuinely useful and will notify you when enrolment opens.
One note for 2026: SEO has become harder across the board. Google’s helpful content updates and AI overviews have shaken up traffic for a lot of bloggers. This makes learning SEO properly more important, not less — but set your expectations accordingly. The days of ranking a 500-word post on a moderately competitive keyword are mostly gone.
Learn more about Stupid Simple SEO >>
A Few Final Thoughts
I’ve been blogging for over ten years now. The skills I picked up from these courses are genuinely valuable — not just for the income, but because they’re transferable. Understanding SEO, affiliate marketing, and content strategy makes you better at almost any kind of online business.
No course is going to make blogging easy. It’s still a lot of work, especially in the early years. What a good course does is point you in the right direction so you’re not working hard on the wrong things, which is exactly where I was before I started investing in my education.
Start with the skill that will move the needle the most for where you are right now. For most beginners, that’s affiliate marketing. Once you’re making something, invest in traffic. Go from there.
Have questions about any of these? Drop them in the comments — I read and reply to all.
Related reading:
- How to Make Money with a Blog for Beginners
- 8 Best Virtual Assistant Training Courses
- 29 Genuine Ways to Make $100 a Day Online
